Coffee or Tea?

[sila-lumenn.livejournal.com]

Tea is nice but coffee is good.  A Google search reveals that the phrase "nice cup of tea" appears about 24,000 times on the Internet, whereas "good cup of tea" appears only about 5,300 times.  However, "good cup of coffee" appears just over 18,000 times, whereas "nice cup of coffee" appears about 5,200 times.  All in all, tea is "nice" about four times more often than it is "good," but coffee is "good" about three times more often than it is "nice."  A search for those phrases in other electronic databases affirms these lexical patterns.  The correlation of coffee with "good" and tea with "nice" may reflect the chemical makeup of the two beverages: a cup of coffee, with its 100 milligrams of caffeine, provides more jolt than a cup of tea, with its 40 milligrams.  Hence, coffee arouses while tea merely refreshes. To put it another way, coffee is sexy, mysterious, earthy - it's good the way a passionate lover is good.  Tea is staid, reasonable, refined - it's nice the way an elderly uncle is nice.

- Mark Morton, from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Teapot," from GASTRONOMICA (Fall 2004)

[Poll #412723]

Comments

[melilot-hill.livejournal.com]

Tea (without anything added), water and milk (and sometimes (orange) juice) are actually the only things I drink . Only on (very) special occacions will I drink a sugar free soft drink.

[dreamflower]

Tea: iced, with sweetener, preferably liquid sweetener. But when at a restaurant I will order the sweet tea which comes already sweetened with sugar.

For those of you who are NOT Americans living below the Mason-Dixon line, Ice Tea *is* what you will get down here if you order just tea and don't specify "hot". And it's only been in recent years that they will ask if you want sweetened or unsweetened: it used to always be sweetened.

Other beverages of choice: Water, Milk, Diet Coke and Buttermilk

jmho

[baisleac.livejournal.com]

Additions to coffee and tea depend on what type they are. Certain roasts of coffee must be "black" to be fully appreciated but others benefit from sugar, milk, both, or creamer. Teas are the same, some benefit from sugar, raw or processed, honey, and/or milk; others scream to be served by themselves. ::smile::

[ansostuff.livejournal.com]

I love both coffee and water and am a periodic tea drinker. I never have anything in coffee (unless I buy cappuchino etc) but I sometimes have sugar or honey or lemon in tea, generally I do that with most fruit flavoured teas because I don`t think the taste is really good unless I add something to it. I don`t use milk though and I rarely drink milk.