The nights are drawing in, and so on. Myself, I think the days are drawing in, and the nights are sneaking up behind and getting in on the act. However you view it, I thought it was starting to get sufficiently seasonal to write this post.
Stew vs. mash is not my evening meal quandry (particularly as Dan is kindly off cooking something completely different), but more of a musing on terms used to indicate when a cup or pot of tea is ready. Brew, draw, etc, all fine – but how likely is it linguistically to get two terms that get used for other food activities AND actually fit with each other, in terms of their other meaning?
Purists will tell me that stew is the point when the tea has gone beyond ready, but it just interested me to see this little pattern arising, in relation to that beloved drink of the UK. I was going to write national drink, but a) coffee may have overtaken it and b) the news is now in the papers that Diageo will not keep jobs in Kilmarnock (for Johnny Walker whisky), so those viewing whisky as the national drink have enough to worry about without a rival claim from tea today.
Meanwhile, the Scotsman did one of its longer pieces on a forthcoming book about an enterprising Scot who did lots of exploring (and/or smuggling, according to your viewpoint) of plants in China, ultimately leading to the identification of a wide range of tea plants. The article tried to hang it on the idea of the man being responsible for tea coming to the UK – perhaps not, but another of those popular science stories that turn out to be fairly amazing.
Dan is reading “Connections” – not an English text book (ah, all those travel-related titles beloved of ELT editors) but the book accompanying the James Burke TV series of many moons ago. The gist of it is that one invention or discovery, big or small, may lead on to many others, and the cumulative effect may be far more than anyone would have thought at the time of the original discovery.
I don’t know quite what you would trace as a line of inventions coming from tea, but I do know that I would ‘invent’ far fewer documents or other items of hopefully (useful) purpose without a certain reliance on tea in the afternoons. Maybe that’s enough connection. From stew to mash, and hence to gravy (train)?