expressions - "This wine is drinking nicely" : does anything else drink nicely?


People tell me this phrase is only used in the context of wine. Even though my lack of knowledge of other phrases that are built similarly suggests these people must be right, my curiosity gets the better of me. After all, I can't claim to know of all the phrases out there.


Are there, though? Something along the lines of:



  • this pizza is eating nicely

  • this gum is chewing nicely


or even with another beverage:



  • this juice/whiskey is drinking nicely



Answer



Others have rightly called this the middle construction or the medio-passive. When a verb allows the object in a transitive clause to become the subject in an intransitive clause it is said to be an ergative verb. Drink is such a verb. We can say They are drinking the wine (transitive verb, wine is object), but we can also say The wine is drinking well now (intransitive verb, wine is subject). The OED’s earliest record of of drink used intransitively in this way is from 1617: The wine . . . drunke too flat.


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