Milk
In language and culture

In Greek mythology, the Milky Way was formed after the trickster god Hermes suckled the infant Heracles at the breast of Hera, the queen of the gods, while she was asleep. When Hera awoke, she tore Heracles away from her breast and splattered her breast milk across the heavens. In another version of the story, Athena, the patron goddess of heroes, tricked Hera into suckling Heracles voluntarily, but he bit her nipple so hard that she flung him away, spraying milk everywhere.

In many African and Asian countries, butter is traditionally made from fermented milk rather than cream. It can take several hours of churning to produce workable butter grains from fermented milk.

Holy books have also mentioned milk. The Bible contains references to the " Land of Milk and Honey " as a metaphor for the bounty of the Promised Land. In the Qur'an, there is a request to wonder on milk as follows: "And surely in the livestock there is a lesson for you, We give you to drink of that which is in their bellies from the midst of digested food and blood, pure milk palatable for the drinkers" (16-The Honeybee, 66). The Ramadan fast is traditionally broken with a glass of milk and dates. In Jewish religious law, Chalav Yisrael is the term regulating consumption of milk.

Abhisheka is conducted by Hindu and Jain priests, by pouring libations on the idol of a deity being worshipped, amidst the chanting of mantras. Usually offerings such as milk, yogurt, ghee, honey may be poured among other offerings depending on the type of abhishekam being performed.

A milksop is an "effeminate spiritless man," an expression which is attested to in the late 14th century. Milk toast is a dish consisting of milk and toast. Its soft blandness served as inspiration for the name of the timid and ineffectual comic strip character Caspar Milquetoast, drawn by H. T. Webster from 1924 to 1952. Thus, the term "milquetoast" entered the language as the label for a timid, shrinking, apologetic person. Milk toast also appeared in Disney's Follow Me Boys as an undesirable breakfast for the aging main character Lem Siddons.

To "milk" someone, in the vernacular of many English-speaking countries, is to take advantage of the person, by analogy to the way a farmer "milks" a cow and takes its milk. The word "milk" has had many slang meanings over time. In the 19th century, milk was used to describe a cheap and very poisonous alcoholic drink made from methylated spirits (methanol) mixed with water. The word was also used to mean defraud, to be idle, to intercept telegrams addressed to someone else, and a weakling or "milksop." In the mid-1930s, the word was used in Australia to refer to siphoning gas from a car.
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