Culture
A brief history of dunking etiquette
Dunking a cookie sounds simple until it collapses into your tea and everyone in the room suddenly becomes a witness.
Dunking has existed for centuries, probably beginning the exact moment someone looked at a dry cookie and thought, "This could be wetter." Historians disagree on the details, mainly because historians have better things to do.
In polite tea rooms, dunking was once considered rude. People were expected to sip tea, nibble delicately, and pretend their cookie was not basically edible chalk. Society has thankfully advanced since then, at least in this one very specific area.
The modern dunker faces a serious technical challenge: duration. A one-second dunk achieves nothing. A three-second dunk is confidence. A five-second dunk is arrogance. Anything beyond that is a cry for help.
Every workplace has one person who thinks they have mastered the perfect dunk. They have not. They are simply one distracted Slack notification away from creating a soggy archaeological site at the bottom of their mug.
Etiquette experts, by which we mean people with strong opinions and access to biscuits, recommend three rules: do not double-dip, do not splash, and do not act surprised when the cookie you fully submerged behaves like something that was fully submerged.
Ultimately, dunking is not just a snack technique. It is a test of patience, courage, and whether you can maintain eye contact after fishing half a cookie out of your tea with a teaspoon.