Re: CHAT drinking soup: (was: Malat (on behalf of Garrett))

At 9:18 pm -0600 8/12/98, Laurie Gerholz wrote:
>Nik Taylor wrote:
.......
>> What do you mean?  Do you "drink" medicine?  Would you say that someone
>> can "drink" poison, or soup, or cigarettes, or anything other than
>> beverages, like water, soda, alcohol, etc.?  I've always heard it used
>> in the way I've defined, "substances intended to be taken for sustaining
>> life".
>>
>
>In my particular dialect (Minnesota, American English), yes, it's
>commonly said to drink poison (if it's a liquid)
Yep - and over here in little ol' Britain poisons are drunk if they're
liquid.  If we said someone had 'taken' poison it'd imply a deliberate act
on the analogy of 'taking medicine', i.e. suicide or a deliberate attempt
to get one's body to build up an antidote to the poison.

>or drink soup (if it's
>primarily broth rather than being thick). Soups can also be "eaten",
>especially if they are thick soups.
Yep - as I said in the mail which began this thread, I often _drink_ soup.
We also eat soup.  The difference is whether it's served in a soup-plate or
bowl & eaten with a soup-spoon or whether we pour it into a mug and drink
it with, maybe, a little teaspoon (coffee-spoon) to help with the more
solid bits!

>Some medicines, if they are liquid,
>can be drunk, although I admit that the more common verb for medicines
>seems to be "take" whether the medicine is liquid, pill or perhaps
>injection.
Very much the case with my southern Brit English - liquid medicines may be
drunk but the common generic verb for all types of ingested medicines is
'take'.

>Poisons also will commonly appear with "take". I hadn't heard
>of "drink" used in conjunction with cigarettes until this discussion,
>but it's an interesting use of the concept.
Some vague memory stirs about my reading that some cultures use the same
verb for the inhaling of tobacco smoke, but I'd forgotten that until this
thread.  I've never come across that in English usage.

Ray.