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It can also refer to food like lunch or dinner which the danish school system did not prepare me for in their english lessons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea
by kawsper 9y ago
It can also refer to food like lunch or dinner which the danish school system did not prepare me for in their english lessons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_(meal)#Tea_as_the_evening_meal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_(meal)#Tea_as_the_evening_...
- jwarren 9y agoAs a Londoner who moved north, it continually confuses me too. "What are you having for tea?" "Oh, err... just milk thanks"
- skety 9y agoYeah, and dinner being used for lunch while tea is used for dinner. Not confusing at all.
- _puk 9y agoAt least you know where you stand with supper, right?!
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoYeah, and with breakfast, cause that's always in the morning ... like a nice afternoon wedding breakfast.
- Khoth 9y agoWell, that depends. In Scotland, "supper" generally means "with chips".
- schrodinger 9y agoAnd which meaning of "chips"?
- nicky0 9y agoThe Scottish one
- QAPereo 9y agoI remember the lunches I used to have back in primary school up in Scotland; instead of having a school dinner, you used to go down to the chip shop, and their 'lunch' was a bag of chips, and you got a free potato fritter. So it was essentially a bag of chips, with a really big chip. Frankie Boyle
- wazoox 9y agoIn French, dejeuner, meaning literally breakfast, used to mean just that. But the nobility was used to getting up so late that dejeuner became lunch, diner became the evening meal, and they invented the 'petit dejeuner' to name the breakfast. In southern France and rural areas, dejeuner remained breakfast, dinner the mid-day meal, and souper the evening one. Miscommunication ensues :)
- baby 9y agoPeople say “dejeuner” to mean breakfast a lot. But everyone knows that it is also not correct (we always this kind of people that will correct people on that)
- mewfree 9y agoIn Québec and French Canada in general déjeuner/dîner/souper kept its original meaning too!
- yesenadam 9y agoThe word 'dîner' also meant breakfast! Wiktionary says: dîner, From Old French disner, from Vulgar Latin *disiūnāre, from disieiūnāre, disjejūnāre (“to break the fast”)
- darrenf 9y agoI don't think it has much to do with being a Londoner; I'm one too (native and resident), yet have used the "breakfast → dinner|lunch → tea" sequence my entire life.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoBeing a Sri Lankan immigrant to Australia, I say dinner, lunch and breakfast. But I always was familar with tea being meal in England. I though it was something I got from my Noddy and William books. But actually, it might just have been an Australian thing that I was reading into othose books. When I acutally went and lived in London, I learned that it was a northern thing. Which is odd, because in other ways Australia seems to be dominated by London culture. Or at least Australians talk like Londoners.
- olau 9y agoAhem, my English book certainly featured a story about a worker kid coming home from school and having some kind of grub "for tea" at 5 pm, i.e. food with tea as the drink. My understanding was that this usage referred to a meal eaten in the evening, i.e. not lunch. Your link seems to confirm that. My grandmother used to serve tea for the evening meal when there were no guests other than her little grandson. But that's the only Danish example I personally know of. Don't know why, tea is not a bad drink for a meal.
- sean-duffy 9y agoTo be clear, "tea" in almost all cases doesn't imply the meal will be served with tea. It's just a name for the evening meal in the north of England.
- ljf 9y agoAs a kid in Sheffield I understood it as 'dinner' was your hot meal whenever you might have it, and tea was a lighter meal. So many kids had a hot meal at school (school dinner) and then went home for tea.
- vidarh 9y agoAs a Norwegian in London, I still find it weird that my sons school serves "school dinner" around lunch-time. Even though the Norwegian word for dinner is "middag" which literally means "middle of the day" (though nobody uses it in that meaning any more, since it would be very confusing given that "middags-tider" "dinner-time" is pretty consistently late afternoon/early evening)
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoAs an American in Norway, I still find it weird that warm lunches aren't a normal part of the school day. Then again, I remember school lunches. The kids aren't missing much.
- flurdy 9y ago
- gumby 9y agoThat Wikipedia section needs a rewrite. It does mention that that usage is a class marker but then conflates it with the pastry-and-tea afternoon snack practice of upper classes. They are two radically disjoint uses. The origin of the “tea” being the term for evening meal are pretty well attested to lie the poverty of the English lower classes who could not afford much more than a cup of tea in the evening. I grew up using the word “tea” to refer to the evening meal in Australia (actually my parents were at pains to avoid this usage, but the rest of my dad’s family still does). My father, the only one in his family to attend university, clearly saw it as a dangerous class marker. Interestingly my mother grew up using a chai language (Marathi) in the home but te languages (Cantonese and Fujianese) in the street. These usages of course were all for the drink. (And btw your comment was funny to me because on of the all time greatest linguists of English was a Dane, Otto Jesperson).
- rkachowski 9y agoI'd never heard of this before. Growing up in rural Scotland, meals were always "Breakfast", "Dinner" and "Tea". There was sometimes confusion with other people over whether dinner was a midday or evening meal, but I'd never thought much of it until now.
- signal11 9y agoThanks, that was very informative. I was always told that dinner (from "dine") is the main meal of the day. So if you have a 'fancy' afternoon meal that can be your dinner (e.g. we usually do Christmas dinner between 3 and 4). I wonder if HN knows of a linguistic map for meal names, it appears that these words shift meaning a lot. EDIT: I thought this was interesting -- "Harvard's Dialect Survey had the question, 'What is the distinction between dinner and supper?' Here's the geographic distribution of their results from 10,661 American respondents" https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22446/lunch-vs-dinner-vs-supper-times-and-meanings https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22446/lunch-vs-d...
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoI don't think it's as easy as geography, it depends on your parents upbringing too. One other great British-English question is "what do you call an individually portioned baked bread article" ... roll, barm, bap, cob, ...
- pjmlp 9y agoIn Portuguese that happens with the word for coffee. Asking someone during the morning if they had their coffee, means if they had taken the breakfast.
- int_19h 9y agoIn Russian, you invite people "for a cup of tea", which really just means "come be my guest", not any particular meal.
- SerLava 9y agoIn American English, if you invite people "for a cup of tea" then someone is getting cups, hot water and tea bags, and not any meal at all.
- weberc2 9y agoNor the American school system for me. ;)
- dctoedt 9y agoAt the U.S. Naval Academy, the nomenclature for meals is quite literal: morning meal; noon meal; evening meal. [0] [0] https://www.usna.edu/Student-Life/Daily-Schedule.php https://www.usna.edu/Student-Life/Daily-Schedule.php