We don't know when things changed. Used to be, you'd buy your coffee to go. You'd use your teeth to rip a wedge-shaped opening in the plastic lid and be on your way. But these are hectic days, and we're far from the coffee-drinking matriarchs of an earlier time.
Coffee is more complicated now, and so are the containers.
Lids are equipped with moats, drip-guards, latches and safety vents. Expert coffee drinkers know that an ability to read the symbols of cup lids is linked to an understanding of the universe. Just as we read tea leaves or ponder the shifting patterns of the stars, we must look to the coffee lid. Now it's clear that, for the coffee drinker on the run, the order of the cosmos is revealed in each spherical cup lid. Herewith, for all true seekers, is a choice selection of the lids and their meanings.