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

Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> Not so easy - it's not always, in Brit.English at least, simply whether the
> food is solid or liquid - it also _how_ it's consumed   ;)
>
> Logics or semantics?  Idiom, it seems to me - the things that make natlangs
> so confoundedly tricky and yet gives them piquancy & stops them being
> boring.
At least in my dialect, "drink" can only apply to liquid substances,
and, in addition, only to substances which are consumed for the purposes
of *sustaining* life, or taken as if it were a substance which sustains
life.  That is, one does not "drink" medicine, one "takes" it, since it
restores, rather than sustains.  Also, one does not "drink" poison, one
"swallows" it, because it harms, or even ends, life.  The exception is
in suicide, you may use "drink", if it's swallowed intentionally, and
ingested as if it were a normal drink.  For example, I would say that
the Jonestown suicides were commited by "drinking" poison, but I would
not say of a person who accidentally ingests poison that they "drank"
it.

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sufficient reason for the invention of free will." - "Lord Leto II"
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