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Is that like how every soft drink is a coke in the American south?
When Ringo Starr told me that a goat ate the Fat Controller’s hat for tea, I knew something was up.
I suppose hot chicken broth could be considered a tea?
Careful with that kind of thinking! If you don’t watch out, you risk entering Salad Theory territory 😬
Explanation if any of our foreign cousins want it.
Tea, short for tea time.
In the South you used to (and still do) have the following three meals a day:
Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
In the North, however…
Breakfast, dinner, tea.
Both might tie the end of the day off with supper too. Brunch is for the jobless middle class and wandered into the conversation with yuppies in the 80s.
There’s also a tea break, which is usually just a cup (or mug if you are a ruffian) of tea. Not to be confused with tea time, where you might reasonably expect to eat your dinner.
Then there’s high tea, which yes, features tea. Often a pot and almost never a mug. It frequently comes with anemic sandwiches and perhaps a scone.
I hope that clears things up.
I hope that clears things up.
Not really. You had me in the first half, tho.
Right? I’m clearly far too American to understand. I’m more confused than I was before.
He’s making things up and moved the goal posts of his claim several times when he got corrected.
Apparently, according to him, the terms ‘afternoon tea’ and ‘high tea’ have been informally switched in the UK, and apparently everyone knows this but it’s not in the wikipedia artical because…
Second goal post move, he’s apparently not talking about the British custom of tea here, but of tea in some other as yet un-named country.
Edit: Chat we’ve hit 3 goal post moves! I repeat, the third goal post has been moved. Our man isn’t playing on any team now and has gone rogue on the pitch as apparently now everything he’s said was all supposed to be just a flippant joke! Lmao.
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Nor does spouting shit and doubling down with yet more shit when you’re corrected.
Anyway, why would I want to be friends with you? That shit you spouted wasn’t even funny bro.
Wait until you find out you can have pudding for pudding.
Edit: Since it’s mean not to explain - pudding is another way to say desert.
How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?
Dinner, as the main meal, used to be closer to midday in agrarian times, with the evening meal being a light supper. Only the industrial revolution, with workers spending most of the working day in the workplace, changed this.
Where my family’s from, that naming convention is still used.
Breakfast - first meal of the day
Dinner - midday meal
Supper - evening meal
Lunch - a small snack with no specific time
Interestingly most Psych units I’ve worked (US) serve (roughly timed):
0800 - breakfast
- along with a lightly caffeinated coffee or tea, the only caffeine routinely served
1200 - lunch
1700 - dinner
2000 - snack
- usually prepackaged chips and crackers, sometimes cookies or ice cream. The long stay hospital gave the patients 25¢ for every group they attended and they could order nicer stuff from the staff member who made the weekly Walmart trip.
Yep, and that industrial revolution is responsible for the N/S split in terms too, the factories of the north and all that.
Then there’s high tea, which yes, features tea. Often a pot and almost never a mug. It frequently comes with anemic sandwiches and perhaps a scone.
High tea is/was the working class term for an evening meal as it was had at the table, and it would usually include cooked meat.
Afternoon tea is the posh one in the afternoon with the cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
What you’ve done there is confuse what I was describing as usage with historical context.
What you just said is like saying, “actually Gay really means just happy”.
I mean, yes, it did, but now not so much.
And that’s the difference between descriptive and prescriptive usage.
David Foster Wallace talks about it a fair bit in one of his essays. Prescriptive description of English usage being somewhat colonial and, to an extent, authoritarian as well as being particularly useless on the ground, so to speak.
So yeah, it was that way around, but try using it that way round now and see how far you get.
Ok, go edit the wikipedia article then if you’re so sure of yourself.
Errr… That’s not what I’m saying chief. I’m saying you are right, just that things have changed in usage.
The wiki article actually says that too.
The wiki article actually says that too.
Can you quote the bit? I’m not seeing it.
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Bruh. You literally posted this: https://slrpnk.net/post/40256413/23312028
I’ll copy it over too, just in case you also don’t remember how to click on links, chief.
Explanation if any of our foreign cousins want it.
Tea, short for tea time.
In the South you used to (and still do) have the following three meals a day:
Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
In the North, however…
Breakfast, dinner, tea.
Both might tie the end of the day off with supper too. Brunch is for the jobless middle class and wandered into the conversation with yuppies in the 80s.
There’s also a tea break, which is usually just a cup (or mug if you are a ruffian) of tea. Not to be confused with tea time, where you might reasonably expect to eat your dinner.
Then there’s high tea, which yes, features tea. Often a pot and almost never a mug. It frequently comes with anemic sandwiches and perhaps a scone.
I hope that clears things up.
So apparently all this here isn’t you explaining about the British custom of ‘tea’ in a top comment on a thread about ‘wacky things British people say’, but is actually you just explaining about the ‘tea’ custom of a totally unrelated and as yet un-named country?..
Seriously, chief, this one is on you. You goofed up and didn’t like being corrected, so you had this little tantrum trying to ‘no, you’ your way into still being right. Lmao. That’s pathetic.
Interestingly, in Canada “high tea” is a fancy afternoon tea with little sandwiches and desserts. Often something you can book at posh hotels like Fairmonts.
I’ve seen places here mix them up too, it’s not uncommon.
If you want to be a pedant or just find this sort of thing amusing, you could send the hotel restaurant a link to the wikipedia page.
Ah Britain, sailing the high teas
It’s not a north/south thing It’s a working class/posho thing
There’s a degree of that, but having lived all over the UK in the last 50 years, I can tell you it really is a North/South thing.
This however also directly correlates with the historical rich/poor divide of the country.
The south has historically been richer, and this is still seen today even with the wealth accumilation that major cities have developed.
So, you agree with me. It is a North South thing?
It’s a rich poor thing just as much as a north south thing.
can confirm, ex’s Manc dad used to call it “Tea”
I somehow feel more informed and more confused at the same time.
Can I use the same mug to microwave all of my meals and tea? I promise to wipe the inside clean with the corner of my shirt.
isn’t that how you are supposed to do it?
In my house we use the Southern words during the week and the Northern version on Sundays, as in Sunday Dinner. Are we weird or does anyone else do that?
Oh yeah, that’s definitely a thing too!
I’m from the north but live with southerners now. I grew up with dinner at noon (in school—dinner time, dinner-ladies).
We’ve now compromised on breakfast, lunch, tea, and on Sunday it’s a grey area between Sunday lunch and Sunday dinner depending on how much the schedule has slipped.
I’ve always called it Sunday lunch, but do use a mush of dinner and tea. Dinner is just the biggest meal of the day, and may or may not be at tea time.
What about second breakfast?
10 o’clock tea and elevenses could both reasonably fit the bill here I feel.
There’s also a tea break, which is usually just a cup (or mug if you are a ruffian) of tea.
Then there’s high tea
What time do you usually have these?
Not to be confused with tea time, where you might reasonably expect to eat your dinner.
Are we talking South dinner or North dinner? .
In the South you used to (and still do) have the following three meals a day:
Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
In the North, however…
Breakfast, dinner, tea.
In the South, we sometimes have “breakfast, dinner, supper” (especially in rural areas; city folks are more likely to have “breakfast, lunch, dinner”) and our tea definitely has ice and a fuckton of sugar in it.
Are we both talking about the UK here?
Ice and sugar in tea feels distinctly not British at all.
Bless your heart. 😉
Maybe it’s a culture thing, but that comes across as a wildly patronising comment from someone who just wandered into a conversation about “not the US” and started talking about the US.
It was meant to be a tongue-and-cheek confirmation that, yes, I was joking about the American south.
It didn’t land well.
Ok, then I’m sorry.
There’s a thing about any conversation online being interrupted by Americans making it about themselves and saying some incredibly patronising things… And that phrase is really only ever heard as that here.
But I see this might not be the case, so I apologise for my hostility there.
If my joke doesn’t land that’s my fault, not yours.
It’s not a cultural thing, it is universally unhinged
Yeah as someone that’s a Yankee to both of them, it’s rude as hell here to be an ass in response to a polite correction to something you probably should have noticed.
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You can also have “breakfast, lunch and tea”, or breakfast, dinner and dinner".
I’m sure. Although I’ve never met anyone who uses breakfast dinner dinner.
Like, seriously, I can’t imagine living like that.
The thing is, you might not know! A work colleague who calls their 12:30pm break their “dinner break”, might separately go home and ask their partner “what should we have for dinner?”.
There’s morning tea which is a light meal between breakfast and lunch.
And there’s tea time, which is dinner, and also tee time, which is a golfing thing.
And there’s also the long dark tea time of the soul, which is a book by Douglas Adams
I’ll have a muffit of tea
While you sit on your tuffit?
British people:
I guess the argument could be made that chicken soup is a tea
i did not expect british diogenes
Why is this usage of tea so confusing for everybody? We re-use words all the time in English. It’s a very simple concept. Imagine if a musician asked about the key of a song and everybody was like “KEY? LIKE A CAR KEY? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? SONGS DONT HAVE KEYS! IVE NEVER BEEN SO CONFUSED IN MY LIFE”
Up north we say “tea” for evening meal. That’s it. Explanation sorted.
Terrible example and it’s just demonstrating that you can’t put yourself in someone else’s shoes for even a moment.
You understand that usage of tea because you used it your entire life, someone who hasn’t would rightfully be confused.
Ok it was a deliberately silly example for emphasis. Here’s a real example. I went to Australia once and in the airport somebody referred to my Mentos as “lolly”. To me, lollies are on a stick. Apparently not to aussies. It threw me off for half a second, but that’s it. Confused is an overstatement.
Imagine you are cooking a chicken. Your flatmate walks in, sees what you’re doing, and says, oh, are you making coffee?
You wouldn’t be just a little bit confused at first?
Yeah but the context clues are a hell of a lot easier there. You’re holding an object, and if someone called it a chupa-chupa or a sucker most people would be able to put that together pretty easily
Now imagine you’re going through stretches and someone walks in and is like “oh, playing football are you”. You could be preparing to go outside and play football… But you’re just stretching
I think most people would be confused by that unexpected second meaning of a familiar word
Not OP, but out of interest, if you are from the UK, what did you call the (primarily) women who served food in school at around noon?
bruh because it’s confusing that a meal is named after a beverage, it’s not the double naming that’s confusing
Because we already have a word that exists for evening meal. It’s dinner. Or supper. Why call it a beverage?
Dinner comes from the French word for breakfast, literally the first meal of the day, and supper means soup. Why are they so much better?
Okay fine then I declare everything I eat at any hour of the day is now called water. But I’ll only talk that way to England folks.
Wait till they find out what „Gohan“ means in Japan, or „Abendbrot“ in Germany. They’re going to have a nervous breakdown.
But when my Irish friend wants to smoke a cigarette, everybody loses their fucking mind.
Yeah, but as someone who grew up down south and has lived in the north for the majority of my life:
Breakfast, lunch, dinner
Very clear, no fucker doesn’t know what you’re talking about
Breakfast, dinner, tea
What the fuck are you playing at, skipping lunch and having a drink to compensate?
Get in the sea
Tea is important enough in this country to not use the word again, especially not for the second most important thing: dinner
Breakfast, lunch, dinner
Dinner is at midday, what are you playing at having 2 meals at midday and no evening meal? Get back to France
I am also someone who grew up down south and we always had breakfast, lunch and tea \o/
Yeah, it’s actually more based around industrialisation than a north/south thing. I think the Cornish miners also came home for noon dinner as the main meal of the day and then had tea in the evening.
That tracks as I’m in the south west
It still confuses me that I can have a cup of coffee with somebody without actually drinking coffee. (In English and my mother tongue as well.)
As a coffee drinker, if I was invited for some coffee and did not in fact get any coffee I’d be both a little confused and a little annoyed.
In Brazil, “café da manhã” (morning coffee) is the term for breakfast, but it’s often shortened to just “café.”
There was a mobile blood donation set up during Covid and I asked the group chat if it was okay to have coffee before donating, and the response was, “Yes, you should definitely be well-fed before donating blood.”
That’s pretty good!
Is the context where if you had said can i drink coffee before, it would have been less ambiguous?
Yeah once a date invited me up for coffee and I was enjoying my time with her and thought another 15 minutes or so of conversation would be nice, but then it was suddenly like she forgot she invited me in or something because she just started getting ready for bed instead of making any coffee! I just politely said I needed to get going so she didn’t feel embarrassed about forgetting she had invited me for coffee, though I think I failed because she did seem a bit upset.
So I tried to be considerate and go through a coffee shop drivethru after the next couple of dates. Even then, she offered coffee the first time and I pointed at my cup and said I’m fine, though that seemed to make her feel even more embarrassed as she looked like she was about to cry after that.
Then the next time she said, “I think we’ve been having a miscommunication when I’ve been inviting you up for coffee, I didn’t really mean coffee, but I was being a bit immature and dancing around what I really wanted and then getting my feelings hurt when you didn’t get the message. So I’ll just say what I mean this time. Would you like to come up and have sex with me?”
I informed her that’s where babies come from and she already knew and still wanted it. Then she was trying to say something about being on a pill and I noped out of there. I am not interested in a relationship where my partner likes to get high on pills and have babies. That just seems irresponsible to me.
Ok yeah my cultural blinders were on here, I totally forgot that here in America coffee can mean sex
You put in a lot of effort on this joke so I’ll give an upvote and this comment
I’m a fan of Norm MacDonald’s style. Not sure why a long joke with a mediocre payoff is so funny to me, though thanks because getting ratio’d by this comment is even funnier. It’s like a committee deciding I deserve a participation trophy, though they did not appreciate the joke itself.
It’s ok how much you like tea. I’m sorry they hurt you about it. Tea is super neat and fun and good. You are super neat and fun and good.
Isn’t “key” for a lock like, as old as modern English?
If they didn’t want to have tea, why the fuck were they making it at tea time?
Have I been confused this when time? If I get invited to have tea am I being invited to a meal? I thought it was like getting coffee.
Offer of a hot beverage:
- Would you like a tea?
- How about a tea?
- (Shouting from kitchen) - Tea?
Even less ambiguous if cuppa/brew etc. is used Typically only offered in the morning or afternoon if you have just ‘popped round’.
Offer of dinner:
- Would you like to stay for tea?
- Come round mine for tea
- Have you had tea yet?
- Oh you should stay for tea
Typically if you you weren’t intending on staying or are being explicitly invited over.
Don’t see how any of this could be confusing at all to people not born into it with innate understanding 😅
As a yank, it’s because you’re saying tea where the correct phrase uses coffee /s
But for real, it’s because over here we offer dinner to mean dinner, and coffee to mean "no obligation to sit through a meal or anything, but please come over/stay a while longer. A coffee can turn into a dinner, but it involves the intermediary offer of “I’m getting kind of hungry, would you like to stay for dinner?”
Its much the same here, honestly in context it would be fairly clear what is meant. I mostly say dinner rather than tea myself. But yeah, the social thing to come and sit with a hot drink, regardless of tea or coffee, is generally to offer it as tea before asking if they want tea or coffee.
OK, I thought I had a good handle on Tea. I was wrong. T(ea)IL
Coffee can be a meal.
I have not experienced that, but I have had a Bloody Mary that qualified as a meal.
You make coffee wrong…
I said can be. The way I make it is something else.
You’d think, but i lived close to a school where the 16 year olds had coffee and cigarettes as breakfast…
Kid I used to know did beer and a cigs for breakfast.
He did not follow Icarus’ path in life
I’ve heard that a russian meal was a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes, didn’t know coffee could substitute that
coffe and a cigarette is the traditional breakfast of most of the romance countries.
And most tradespeople in the rest of europe.
yeah, probably depends on where you live i guess
Apparently some Australian families refer to the midday meal as “dinner” instead of “lunch” which I only learned after hesitantly sitting down for “dinner” at 1pm.
Back in the day, the noon/midday meal was called dinner also in the US. Particularly in rural areas. And for some of us boomers it’s still dinner. Growing up on a farm, Breakfast was 6am-ish thing after chores were done, (you could sneak in some jelly toast before chores if you weren’t to lazy to get up early enough), the noon dinner, and you always came home to eat it, was a full meal deal because you had spent your morning often doing heavy manual labor. Plus your afternoon was going to be no different. You got lunch a 4pm because supper was a 7pm-ish meal, (often heavy on the “ish” part depending on what went wrong during the afternoon).
We evidently didn’t get the memo about changing dinner to lunch until much, much later. Besides, we would have needed to rename “lunch” to something else for the 4pm break. I still call the noon meal dinner to this day. You can call it whatever you like, because I don’t sweat those details.
My great uncle got embarassed over this early on in his career. His boss invited him to dinner on Saturday and so he showed up with his wife around noon since that was the typical understanding in his home region. The boss thought he was crazy and told him off for arriving hours earlier than expected.
They still call the midday meal dinner and the later one supper, though I say lunch for the middle one and use the words dinner & supper interchangeably.
In my rural midwestern US family, “dinner” meant the largest meal of the day, frequently with our extended family, almost always at my grandparents’ house.
“Sunday dinner” was midday, right after church. This was typically pot roast in the cold months and barbecue in the summer.
On weekdays, dinner was in the evening after everyone came home from work and school. We had a big family dinner at least a couple of times per week when I was a kid. (My grandma and sometimes my great aunts would do the cooking. In hindsight, I think my mom and my uncle struggled financially after their respective divorces, and this was the older generation’s way of helping them out.)
Holiday dinners were usually midday, unless someone had to work and we needed to plan around that.
If we were talking about the meal at a specific time of day, we used “lunch” or “supper,” since “dinner” was ambiguous.
Very common in the UK too. Lunch is dinner, dinner is dinner, dinner is tea, tea is also a specific type of afternoon meal (scones and sandwiches).
Even then, people will just say something like ‘morning tea’ instead of breakfast.
It’s a linguistic war zone.And if you want actual tea, you ask for a ‘cuppa’
Or a brew in the North.
What the fuck.
Have never heard anyone call lunch anything other than that, unless it is a tradie who might say ‘smoko’ for lunch or a 15 minute snack break.Aussie terms for meals:
Breakfast/brekkie
Morning tea/smoko*
Lunch (or brunch if its ~9-11am)
Afternoon tea/arvo tea*
Dinner/Tea
Dessert/Sweets**morning/arvo tea are primarily for social sit downs and would be like biscuits/scones and a cup of tea/coffee (having a cuppa with friends/family, small meetings with clients, retirees with nothing better to do)
- dessert/sweets is if your having something after dinner, like some pie/crumble with ice cream, pancakes, etc)
Also ‘entree’ is a small course before the main meal in dinner, the USA confused the fuck out of me when i visited.
Apparently, your entrées are our appetizers :)
My Aussie friend mainly had problems with remembering our egg doneness “sunny side up” and “over easy”, i’m unsure of what her proper terms were for it.
Yes, an entree is also known as an appetiser, as per the definition of the word ;)
We would say sunny side up here too, but we would probably more commonly just say ‘flipped’.
And i order myne “cooked through” or “flipped and crucified”, because i really prefer theres no runny yolk unless its mi goreng or over steak tartare.
I think they call it supper right? I believe this was an American South thing too
Supper = dinner in The South
And Midwest many places
There also was a contemporary nuncheon “light mid-day meal,” from noon + Middle English schench “drink.”
https://www.etymonline.com/word/lunch
It’s fucking beverage all the way down in English.
Bonus:
BRIBE. Lunch’d O dear! Permit me, my dear Mrs. Prattle, to refresh my sponge, upon the honey dew that clings to your ravishing pouters. O! Mrs. Prattle, this shall be my lunch.
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Well, according to British Standard 6008 (ISO 3103), the preparation of a liquor of tea requires a tea leaf.
I don’t know why I have that knowledge in my back pocket, nor the urge to share that information, but there you go.
My guess would be via Tom Scott
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nAsrsMPftOI&pp=ygUNVG9tIHNjb3R0IHRlYQ%3D%3D&ra=m
Wait. Wait. I think I can explain this whole thing. Marklar, these marklars want to change your marklar. They don’t want Marklar or any of these marklars to live here because it’s bad for their marklar. They use Marklar to try and force marklars to believe they’re marklar. If you let them stay here, they will build marklars and marklars. They will take all your marklars and replace them with Marklar. These marklar have no good marklar to live on Marklar, so they must come here to Marklar. Please, let these marklars stay where they can grow and prosper without any marklars, marklars, eh or marklars.
Buffalo.
Watermelon.
No marklar on my watch
