Uhoh, thinking again

[ailbhe]

[Poll #1280047]

Comments

[clare-s.livejournal.com]

Lunch and dinner likewise dinner and tea are used interchangeably. This often occurs within the same sentence.

[rpdom.livejournal.com]

Morning meal is called Tea (Earl Grey, hot)

Midday meal is called Beer ;-)

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

At one of my boarding schools, the evening meal was always supper.

[kaberett.livejournal.com]

All snack-type-meals, particularly if they consist of a hot drink and cake, get to be die Heisswasserstunde, though the afternoon snack-type-thing is more likely to happen in my family and therefore more likely to be referred to as such.

[songster.livejournal.com]

Meal nomenclature doesn't say a lot about social class, but does say a certain amount about geographical origin, which is correlated with class to a degree.

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

Once I was nearly reduced to tears by a teacher asking me if I was staying at school for dinner.
I was just learning English. I was maybe eight. I had just read in a book that 'dinner' was the evening meal. I had images in my head of being left at school until after dark and I was terrified. I didn't manage to answer the teacher. I did not know - or could not think - how to say 'I don't understand' or 'what do you mean?' . The teacher was trying to fill out the form and getting angry at me for not answering at all.

(I had school-dinners for a short while. I didn't like them. In the end I brought sandwiches from home, that my mother made. Those were good.)

[ladyynara.livejournal.com]

Growing up (South-East England) we generally called dinner time "tea", but I moved to America when I was 18 and started copying US-hubby and have called it dinner ever since.
My American MIL calls it supper, which is now confusing my kids.

[moonborn.livejournal.com]

we have morning tea as well as afternoon tea!
And the evening meal is dinner or tea - if it's after about 9pm I've heard it referred to as "supper" as well, though that also often means it's a light meal rather than a full one.
Lunch is never referred to as dinner. I found this quite confusing whilst living in England.
I'm in southeast Australia. :)

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Other for evening meal: if I had dinner at lunchtime, then I have tea at teatime. But if I had lunch at lunchtime, then I have dinner at teatime. ;)

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Eaten just before bed is often supper, because supper didn't happen, due to Late at Work. Class information from names of meals may well be available, but is quite possibly also Wrong (as in incorrect, rather than a bad thing).

Small afternoon staving off of hunger pangs with something that classes as 'proper food' is just 'tea' (teatime is 4 to 5 in my world), but it has to be proper nutritional stuff, or cakes. Crisps, chocolate etc are 'snacks', no matte what time of day it is.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm also in Australia, and we have morning and afternoon tea, even if no tea is involved.

[batswing.livejournal.com]

Same.
Which in my case is what happens when people from one class socialise and marry into another.

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

Interpreting "is usually called" as "is usually called by me" and, in the cases where I don't eat anything at those times, naming the thing I might like to eat then if I did :-) Hence "elevenses" and "afternoon tea": e.g. it's only the presence of scones and cake that would tempt me to eat in that short interval between lunch and supper! Colin, OTOH, has "snack" any time he eats outside the time of the three main meals. The evening meal is supper if it's our usual informal at-home meal, but a three course with-cloth-napkins meal is dinner to me.

[firecat]

The morning meal is usually called
*breakfast
But I might as well call it
*coffee
because that's what it involves for me personally.

A smackerel of something taken mid-morning is usually called
*a coffee break
When I worked in a job where some people in the job punched a clock, there was a coffee break at a specific time of the morning. It might or might not involve food or coffee.
Now that I don't work at that job, I call it
*a snack

The midday/early afternoonish meal is usually called
*lunch
or
*brunch if it's the first actual meal of the day and it's a weekend

If something is eaten mid-afternoon, it is usually called
*a coffee break
*a snack

The evening meal is usually called
*dinner
*supper (if it's an especially light meal)
*dindin (in my household. comes from a Morris the Cat TV ad)

Something eaten just before bed is usually called
*a midnight snack

Some information about social class is available from what people call their meals
*probably

[rjw76]

Mid-day meal is called "lunch" or "dinner" depending on if it's a main meal.

Evening meal, then, is "dinner" if you had lunch, or "tea" if you had dinner :-)

[clarahippy.livejournal.com]

I call a mid-morning snack 'teabreak' even though I drink coffee during it, because nurses on the wards all call it 'teabreak'. Mid afternoon would just be 'a snack' because afternoon tea is a very specific thing to me that I usually had with my mother.

An after-dinner snack is just a snack to me, mainly because I wouldn't be eating a meal. Dinner is my last full meal and can be fairly late on, my snack would never be anything more substantial than tea and toast and even that is rare.

Personally I think you can tell more about where someone is from regionally than their social class from what they call meals. It could be that I am just rubbish at spotting these things though!

You've made me simultaneously homesick for afternoon tea with my mum and thoughtful about how I am absorbing nursing culture.

[dmwcarol.livejournal.com]

I use most of those terms pretty much interchangably so I don't consider them to have much relevance.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Evening meal is a world of social anxiety. I usually say dinner; at home, I am to say high tea on Saturdays, low tea on Sundays, supper during the week and dinner if we have guests. Complicated.

[cat63.livejournal.com]

Apropos of the afternoon snack thing, we once saw an ad for a guided cycling holiday which promised "11s and 3s" so ever after we have referred to midafternoon snacky things as "threeses". Which probably isn't even a proper word, but that's still what we call it :-)

[pogodragon.livejournal.com]

Breakfast, dinner and tea are the three main meals, food just before bed is supper but I don't tend to use the word - possibly because I don't tend to eat just before bed. If I'm in a job where such things happen the mid-morning or mid-afternoon break are coffee break (mainly because I don't routinely drink tea), but the signal that one is going for coffee break is a 'T' sign made with ones hands.

I do, however, use the words lunch and dinner when talking to other people - lunch at least is unambiguous, or the group I do such things with most often will use a form such as 'shall we go for food after the lecture', which clarifies timing.

My background is - very working class grandparents, parents moved up to some flavour of middle class, I'm pretty definitely middle class. All 3 generations born and raised in Nottingham, though I've not lived there now for over 20 years. I think usage is really too mixed to reliably tell anything about class from the words solely.

[k425.livejournal.com]

The names for meals are more geographical than class based, but with so much social and geographical mobility now, it's harder to used them to "classify" people.

I grew up with breakfast, dinner, tea and supper. These days I have breakfast (or "a nice pot of tea"), lunch and dinner. And "what can I have to eat now?" if I'm hungry between 8-10pm, though that might be a piece of chocolate or a bowl of popcorn. The latter could be a snack or supper, but the chocolate wouldn't count as either.

We use the words dinner and tea interchangeably especially with Jack, who had breakfast, dinner and tea when he was at nursery followed by supper at home before bed. I feel like a bilingual family sometimes!

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

"Snack" when I'm with the kids. Otherwise (say, at work) it's just grazing and doesn't have an occasion name.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Something eaten mid-afternoon is called tea-and-biscuits, or coffee-and-cake, or just 'some tea'. I'd probably call it afternoon tea if I was eating it somewhere where they serve you a selection of sandwiches and cakes on one of those multistorey plate things, but I've never had occasion to use the phrase in real life.

Teabreak and coffeebreak refer to an opportunity to stop working for a hot drink, rather than a meal or regular snack time.

The evening meal is dinner if it's a main meal (as for lunch) and tea if it isn't.

[mrs-warwick.livejournal.com]

same here.
I also agree with the comments that say it's as much about geography as it is about social status.

[rjw76]

Ditto. Oop north, even the posh people seem to often say "lunch" and "tea". In Cambridge, where I live now, "tea" is never a meal, it's a drink.