Talk:posset

Drink, food

We had this defined only as a beverage. I just saw a recipe for a lemon posset (pudding-like food) served in the emptied-out lemon's rind. I tentatively added that as a separate sense, although I considered whether there might be only one sense, a dish that varies in thickness / presentation from being a beverage to a food (like in some citations people drink soups that are thin, and in other cites people eat soups that are thick, but soup has just one sense). But I can't find a dictionary that includes both things, whether under one definition or two: Merriam-Webster only has the drink, Cambridge only has the food, the 1933 OED has the drink as "only historical" and doesn't cover the food, which is clearly not historical, it's on modern recipe sites and tiktok. - -sche (discuss) 07:11, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I have the suspicion that whether one eats or drinks a soup is not a function of the food properties but of the vessel in which it is afforded, or also cultural habits. There isn’t even a clear line between eating and drinking, unlike the etiquette of the leisure class suggests, as if you bow down to your cup (!) of soup with chopsticks and push it to your moth to slurp it is remote of the usual qualities of eating beginning from not involving anything like a spoon. You have dealt with many exotic languages: Are there some which do not distinguishing eating and drinking? And even if not, then it might be possible that the distinction is but the purpose: Drinking is an activity with the purpose of taking in liquid and eating an activity with the purpose of taking in the other macronutrients. So people’s meals nowadays—dubiously defined by Wiktionary as “eaten”—are often smoothies or protein shakes. Everyone is a subconscious nutritionist, and language has evolved to transmit these subconscious considerations before lexicographers and linguistics conceptualized them comparatively, otherwise man would have died out. Fay Freak (talk) 08:52, 4 July 2023 (UTC)