This is a productive conversation, so let’s keep it going.
Most people happy with a bag of Lipton in their mug would look at my tea ware collection and ask: Why? What’s so complicated about steeping some leaves in hot water that you feel you need all this stuff?
To them, a teapot has one function that—and this is the critical part—is sufficiently fulfilled by any design. If it can hold a liter of water off the boil, strain the tea (if using loose-leaf) and pour nicely into a cup, it’s a teapot.
Present them with any kind of tea and you’ll get a response based on this straightforward conclusion. Oh, you have a special green tea from Japan that can only be brewed at or below 72°C? Great, you can brew it at that temperature in the same teapot. Got a 2010 sheng that’s finally mature? Great. Brew it in the same teapot. FFS, this isn’t complicated. Why on earth do you ‘tea enthusiasts’ insist on needing more than one teapot?
I can answer this question but that’s not the reason I’m writing this.
My point—which you probably saw galloping from about a mile away—is that most people unfamiliar with guns ask the same equivalent question of gun enthusiasts: why so many guns? Isn’t the sole function of a gun to shoot a bullet? Why can’t you just be happy with a nice hunting rifle? You can still shoot cans off the fence with that even if you don’t plan on hunting, right? And so on.
So when you write ‘many different types for different uses’, I can only think of tea pots. What I’d like to understand is what that means, in native terms, when it comes to guns.
[EDIT: Following @SlyBevel’s excellent suggestion, please hold your comments until I’ve created a thread to continue the conversation. Should be just a few minutes. — 20:30EST] Done!
