Not recommended.

[rivka]

I singed the hem of my sweater while making tea this morning.

As best as I can figure out, it slipped under the teakettle and into the flame while I was stretched up trying to extract a teabag from a box in the cabinet over the stove.

Fortunately, it didn't actually catch fire - it just browned, and smelled horrible. But it made for a pretty troubling mental image. (Sweater in flames! Burned baby! I've never used a fire extinguisher!)

This is why British folks use electric kettles, isn't it?

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It could be two things, but the one I meant here was the top part of the stove, where the burners are, whether gas or electric.

You don't call that a hob? What do you call that?

(The other thing it could be is a friendly house-elf that does the housework for you. If you have one, leave them food, but not clothes. Clothes offend them.)

(Oh, and a hobnob is a chocolate covered oatmeal b/i/s/c/u/i/t/ cookie.)

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Over this side, it's a burner.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Hobs have four burners!

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

This is a point of English that's eluded me so far.

[balmofgilead.livejournal.com]

top part of stove where burners are = stovetop around here.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

You don't call that a hob? What do you call that?

I call it the stovetop. There's an American brand of packaged dressing called "Stovetop Stuffing," by which Americans are given to understand that it's cooked on a burner rather than in the oven.

The other thing it could be is a friendly house-elf that does the housework for you.

Is there a British distinction between a hob and a brownie? Because I would call a housework-performing house-elf a brownie. In fact, that's where the youngest level of Girl Scouts gets their name - they're supposed to be learning about helpfulness at home, and so forth.

(All together now, those of you who were Brownie Girl Scouts:

Twist me and turn me
And show me an elf,
I looked in the mirror
And saw..."

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I call the top part of the oven the "oventop", and only the actual burner (or hotplate, on an electric oven) the "hob". I ask my son to put something on the "front left hob" or the "back right hob", for instance. I hadn't consciously come across someone using "hob" to mean the whole oventop, although I suppose it wouldn't always be obvious from context that they were doing so.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Myself... though the version I learned in Brownies was:

Twist me and turn me
And show me the elf,
I looked in the water
and there saw... myself.

The difference between a hob and a brownie is that brownies are cutesy and made-up and I only ever heard about them in Brownies, whereas hobs are real. No, stop, the real difference is that hobs are from the North of England and brownies from the South, and I used to live in the North. Also hobs can turn mischievous if you give them clothes, they can become boggarts, they have the unchancy fairy nature, they're not just conveniences.

"Stovetop" as a name works if it's actually the top of the stove, but not if you have an ultra-clever kitchen like my friends S&P, where the hob is separate.

Hob is an old word, which makes it strange that it should have died out in US usage, which usually clings to the old.

When Yeats in the poem "Fairy Child" talks about the delights of the real world, one of the images he uses is "and the kettle on the hob sing peace into your breast", and my Auntie Doris (who cooked on a Victorian fire with ovens until she died in 1976, mainly out of the same sort of stubbornness in which I am still writing in DOS on a 286) used to call the griddle and the whole side of the fire bit the hob. You couldn't call that a stovetop -- there wasn't a stove.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Range.

[dragon3.livejournal.com]

cooktop

[rivka.livejournal.com]

"Stovetop" as a name works if it's actually the top of the stove, but not if you have an ultra-clever kitchen like my friends S&P, where the hob is separate.

*thinks*

I think I would still call it a stovetop. "She's got a little galley kitchen, and there's just a stovetop, no oven."

Maybe.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Hob = range = stovetop. It usually consists of 2 or 4 burners, in homes. (A big restaurant kitchen might have 6 or 8.) Sometimes there's enough heatproof material between them to put down a pot.) Burners can be gas or electric, and the electric ones can have a range without an oven. In some of the apartments rented by poor students in Ann Arbor, the "kitchens" have a small refrigerator and a 2-burner range, but there's no oven. At the other end of the socioeconomic scale, cooking magazines have pictures of fancy ovens under plain countertops, or mounted higher than you could work at them with a range on top (so you don't have to bend over to put stuff in them.) Extravagent, of course, but some people are.