short eats
n.pl.— «If your appetite grows during the day, you can stop at one of the many tea houses which dominate any town’s streets, and order “short eats,” a lovely collective noun for various snacks, such as small patties, spring rolls, samosas, fritters, and small desserts of spiced flours, coconut and cashew nuts.» —“It’s lush eating in Sri Lanka” by Patricia Stamp, Stephen Katz Globe and Mail (Toronto, Can.) Apr. 23, 1986. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
How do you pronounce rooibos? The name of this tea comes from the Afrikaans words rooi bos, meaning “red bush.” Rooibos is pronounced ROY-boss, but it’s also called bush tea, red tea, or redbush tea. This is part of a complete episode.
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