Can we settle this: how many holes does a straw have?
At work we somehow landed on the topic of how many holes a human has, which then evolved into a heated discussion on the classic question of how many holes does a straw have.
I think it's two, but some people are convinced that it's one, which I just don't understand. What are your thoughts?
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A hollow cylinder has a single hole, with two openings. A hole can be open on one end only (e.g., a well is a hole in the ground), or it can have multiple openings (e.g., a straw has a hole with two openings).
If one cannot immediately tell whether two openings are connected to one another, then one assumes they are not; e.g., if you see a well in Florida you don't assume it is the opening of a hole that extends to connect to another opening in Australia.
Not a native speaker, but doesn't "hole" refer to an opening? The structure which connects two openings, but is itself not connected to the outside would be called cave, or tunnel.
It usually does, however, there are cases where a hole can have two openings. For example, there's a saying/idiom about digging a hole through the earth and ending up in china/australia/etc. It would be confusing to say that you "dug two holes" to China, you would only say that you "dug a hole" to China. "Tunnel" is definitely more precise here, though it would be odd to refer to the openings in a drinking straw as a "tunnel"