Tea is a treat, no matter how many days in a row I drink it. I take the fully-caffeinated kind, no sweetener, no lemon, usually iced. A colleague joined me at the bus stop one chilled morning last year and noted with some degree of dismay, even disapproval, "I see you have your iced tea."
"Yes, yes I do," I replied, and added with sudden insight, "No one ever says to a coffee drinker in the heat of summer, 'I see you have your hot coffee.'" Her response was a perplexed look, which rather disappointed me. Perhaps my point was too subtle. This bus-riding biology professor was not the first person to have made a remark questioning my choice of iced tea and I was feeling rather put out.
Tea is certainly an ingrained part of our culture, yet it's popularity still pales in comparison to coffee. Sometimes I wonder if the cagey remarks are coming from a defensive mode. After all, the coffee drinkers I know rarely drink just black coffee. Instead, they load it up with sugar and fat and swallow down a huge percentage of their daily calories in one morning cup of joe. Maybe they see my tea and feel some sort of self-imposed guilt. It may not have the fat of a latte or mocha, but how do they know it's not teeming with a high-calorie sweetener? Why make themselves feel guilty?
This same defensive mode often kicks in when I mention to a new acquaintance that I am a vegetarian. "Oh, yes," they say, "I don't eat much meat these days either. And especially not red meat."
To prove their point, these same folks, when in a group that has ordered several pizzas, will take one piece of pepperoni and a couple of pieces of vegetarian. A linguistics professor and I once tried to come up with a term for this phenomenon. She, too, over the years had tired of getting about a third as much pizza as the non-vegetarians. We never settled on a clever new term, but since then I've always thought of it as "the meat-eater's prerogative."
And speaking of prerogative, what makes people who see me indoors and bundled up in a coat because I'm shivering from the air conditioning feel like they can say, "You need more meat on your bones, girl!"?
The last time this was said to me by an officemate it hit me two days later that, hell, meat on my bones is exactly what I do have. It's the surrounding fat that I have in modest amounts. The disregard for my discomfort makes me surly. Especially when I realize that when someone complains of feeling overheated in what feels to me like a nice, cozy room, it would never occur to me to respond, "You need less blubber on that bod, girl!"
All of these complaints are small in the grand scale of life, but I think of them often because I love words, and I love how being careful and thoughtful with our choice of words can empower ourselves and our friends. Being care-less with words can hurt more than we realize.
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