From: "alexander koryagin" <koryagin@erec.ru>

F2EP
Hi, Ardith Hinton! How are you?
on Wednesday, 02 of October, I read your message to alexander koryagin
about "Soup(-)making.... 1."

A soup kitchen? What is it? I always thought that kitchen
is a room to prepare any food.

From my OXFORD CANADIAN DICTIONARY:
soup kitchen [n.]
a place where warm meals, usu. soup, are served
to the needy for little or no charge.

While such places may offer other items from time to time, I imagine soup is typically on the menu because it's a cheap & easy
way to feed a crowd when a particular organization depends on who
chose to donate what this week. :-))

In other word "soup kitchen" is a print advertisement telling "you
can come in for lunch, but don't count on more than soup." ;-)

(???... that a kitchen is THE room... which article is more
correct?)

I would say "a". In Vancouver there are various churches & other charitable organizations which offer such services on a regular
basis. It's also possible, though not common, for a single-family residence to have more than one kitchen. Some Jewish families have
two because it's easier to keep kosher that way. Some folks from
India & other parts of Asia where extended families often live together tell us they prefer two. And I understand that years
ago... before the advent of electric fans, of air conditioning, and
of cookstoves which didn't take an hour or two to finish heating
up... a lot of farm families on the North American prairies had
summer kitchens attached to the exterior of their houses. If you imagine what it's like preserving food with a method which requires boiling large amounts of water for a long time, during the heat of August... it's hot work even in this area, where we don't have a mountain range & eighteen hours by train between us & the ocean.
:-)

Indeed, in our apartments we have different rooms and one of them is
a kitchen, if you don't prefer a kitchen island in your dining room. But
if you live in prairie you can easily have different outhouses for every purpose a human needs. The distance between separate buildings depends
on the climate in winter. ;-)

<skipped>

But when we make "soup-making" we mean a single word.

Uh-huh. In some cases this might be an intermediate step between
(using the same example) "soup making" and "soupmaking", however.
One of my Canadian-born relatives, who would be 100 years old if
she were still alive, spelled "today" & "tomorrow" with a hyphen...
and I've noticed this spelling in books from the early 20th century. Now, North American recipes often use "teaspoon" & "tablespoon" as measurements. Both are in such common use that we
even have abbreviations for them. So why would people write the
names of some kinds of spoons as one word & others as two?? IMHO we
tend to condense terms like this as time goes by & we become more familiar with them.... :-)

But if I write a formal message or I translate a book I should probably check a dictionary. If I find a complex word it's OK, but if it
isn't there probably I should write the two words separately, without a hyphen. Shouldn't I?

[...If your husband started to look in your eyes, put yourself on a diet]
Bye Ardith!
Alexander (yAlexKo[]yandex.ru) + 2:5020/2140.91
fido7.english-tutor 2013



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