171–180 of 338 posts
Tea to Japan was certainly not "by land". I know they want to make it into a simple rule, but that's just not as simple as they pretend.
Exactly and London working class slang for tea is cha, which I always assumed must have originated at the docks.
This is actually featured in the movie "Bronson", and I was unaware of its usage in the UK until I saw it.
At least in Australia, "chai" is on sale in cafes meaning Masala chai, a mix of leaf tea and Indian spices and herbs. And then you've got the "chai latte", like a regular latte but with "chai" instead of espresso. Amusing weirding of language - it should really be a "masala"!
Same in many parts of the US, except it's taken one step further with "chai tea" - even in big-budget advertisements by chains who should know better. Seeing or hearing "chai tea" drives my Indian wife up the wall everytime.
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That 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…
I'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.
And sometimes if you're really lucky you'll meet a Southerner who'll freak out about it, "Ha! You said 'dinner' but you meant 'lunch'!! Ha! Ha! When do you eat your lunch?! Ha Ha!!"
I had an old boss that did this regularly. The dick.
Almost the same goes for the word Restaurant. Everywhere in the world it's almost the same - except in Russia it is pectopah! :)
For those who can't read any Russian, or never read that short story where this is the punchline essentially, pectopah is pronounced restoran. It only drops the T, basically.
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Thanks, 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, 'Wh…
I 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, ...
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In 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 :)
People 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)
I'd like to see the equivalent map for 'coffee'.
It's pretty similar with coffee being almost universal across different languages.
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As 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)
Then again Norwegians have Frokost as breakfast time, whilst Danes have Frokost at lunch..
The large meal taken in the middle of the day was "middagsmad", or "midday food" (still is in the older generations, especially rurally, in Denmark), while "middag" is generally the larger, evening meal today (so, same deal as "dinner" in English).
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That 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…
I'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.
Upon moving to the central belt, and ingratiating myself into more middle class circles of friends I then discovered:
Breakfast - eaten usually when you get up in the morning, say early morning until ~1030am
Lunch - eaten from 12pm until ~2:30pm
Afternoon Tea - taken from around 3:30pm until 4:30pm (cakes/biscuits [cookies] and would also include some kind of sandwich - often cut into triangles)
Tea - 5pm until 6pm - usually a lighter two course meal (say an omlette) and some pudding (desert).
Dinner - taken from 7pm until perhaps 9pm - this would be a fully laiden two or three course meal.
Supper - taken from around 10pm until around 11pm (or just before bedtime) - likely cheese on toast or crackers & cheese and a cuppa.
Obviously you don't need to have every one of these meals every day of the week.