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]

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.