New player, question about "putting" / "inserting"

Hi. I’m new and I’m trying to make my first simple inform game. I wanted to make a condition about “instead of inserting water into something”… but inform doesn’t seem to recognize the verb. This is the part of my current game typed out (sorry, there are probably a ton of things I’m not supposed to do, but this is my first attempt).

(note: I did define “boiled” earlier, at least to the best of my knowledge.)

I’m super iffy about that second part but that’s the idea I’m trying to get across, and I was experimenting with ways to phrase it but I can’t get past this roadblock.
For the first part, I thought it would work since it seemed to be pretty close to some of the examples I read in the manual.

When I type phrases like the ones above, inform keeps reading the verb as “inserting water into anything except a mug,” or whatever the whole phrase is. How do I get it to read them as different phrases, or a verb and a phrase?

[code]Check inserting water into something (called M):
if M is not a mug:
say “No, that will be ruined. Try putting it into a mug.” instead.

Check inserting tea into something (called M):
if M is not a mug:
say “You probably want to put that into a mug if you intend to drink it.” instead.

After inserting something into a mug (called M):
if M contains tea and M contains boiled water:
now a random boiled water in M is off-stage;
now the tea is edible;
say “Congratulations, you made tea.”[/code]