About the Author Hilary P. is a professional psychotherapist and has practised in the United Kingdom for over 15 years. Hilary has a keen interest in language learning, with a classical language educational background. Hilary's particular interests & experience is in psychology, education & learning, especially online learning and language acquisition. Support For support files and downloads related to this text, please visit https://adeptenglish.com/. At adeptenglish.com, you can also read a collection of free articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers from Adept English. Transcript Dinner, Tea and Supper Hi there, I m Hilary and welcome to this latest podcast from Adept English. Just in case you haven t listened to one of our podcasts before, the aim is to help you become fluent in English, through listening. Listening will help you learn to think in English and take you away from translating. Adept English aims to help you through the difficult stages of learning a language and the listening that you do with us will support you when you come to speak English. For more information, visit our website at www.adeptenglish.com. There you ll find more podcasts, our courses and lots of articles to read. You can sign up for our free course, the Seven Rules of Adept English, which tells you lots of powerful secrets about language learning. So today s subject. What do we call our meals in the UK? A meal is a time when you sit down, possibly with members of your family and you eat together. It s often said that people have a lot of dinners in front of the TV, the television or that families don t eat together. But most of the families I know do sit down and eat together in the evening, round a table most of the time. Copyright Adept English Production reference: A00052 Page 1
So the simplest meal of the day and one which pretty much everyone in the UK calls the same thing is breakfast. Literally the word means that you are breaking your fast. A fast is the name for a period of time when you don t eat. So this fast means overnight you didn t eat anything, so when you have your breakfast in the morning, you break fast. Not everyone eats breakfast of course, but those who do are likely to eat toast, so that s toasted bread or cereal, most days of the week. Cereal means cornflakes or cheerios or something made by Kelloggs or Nestlé which you eat in a bowl with milk. Most people probably drink tea, coffee or orange juice with this. In the UK, people also eat cooked breakfast sometimes, maybe at the weekend, and this may include bacon and eggs and sausages. But most people don t eat this all the time they want to be healthy and not eat too much. So breakfast is fairly simple. However, with the other two meals of the day, it can be a bit confusing. Confusing because the names vary depending upon which part of the UK you re from. So in the south of England usually, people will call the meal in the middle of the day lunch. This is the meal you have at around one o clock, 1pm, certainly between 12pm and 2pm. And if you re at work, this is probably referred to as your lunch break. And then for most people in the south of England, the meal that you eat in the evening when you get home from work is dinner. So dinner would be probably 7pm or 8pm in the evening. But in the north of England, the Midlands, parts of Wales, parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, people may talk about the meal they eat at lunchtime as their dinner and their evening meal as their tea. So why this difference? There s a bit of history behind this and it s a bit to do with the British class system, as well as which part of the UK you re from. If you haven t heard of this before, the British class system is quite complex and difficult even for people born in the UK sometimes. It s a whole discussion topic on its own. To help you understand the idea, if you think of the early 1900s, there was a big difference between the lives of the upper classes and the working classes. If you ve ever watched TV programmes like Downton Abbey, this will help! The upper classes are the people who belong to the aristocratic families, like the Crawley family in Downton Abbey. So the people who were rich, owned the big houses, lots of land. They re the upper classes, and they re often referred to as posh. They would have a meal called afternoon tea, served at around 4 o clock in the afternoon, where cakes and small sandwiches and cups of tea (meaning the drink here) would have been taken, probably Copyright Adept English Production reference: A00052 Page 2
mainly by the ladies. These women didn t work and so had time to drink tea at 4 o clock in the afternoon. Then they would have eaten a more formal dinner at around 8 o clock in the evening. Formal means a meal that you dress up for, which probably has several courses. It s more serious, like a ceremony. It s what you d call it now, if you went out for your evening meal to a nice restaurant, one with white table cloths and wine glasses, you would call this going out for dinner. In the 1900s however, the working class people were the normal people, who weren t rich. So again, if you think of Downton Abbey, this would have meant the servants, the people who worked downstairs. More generally, working class, meant the people who had to go out to work for their money, in factories or as servants or people working on the land or down mines. Mines are where you work underground. So the working classes would usually have started work very early in the morning, so they would have been hungry by the middle of the day and returned home for their main meal and therefore called that their dinner. And when they returned home at the end of the day, they would have been hungry having worked long hours and wanted to eat straight away. So they had a meal called high tea which would have been eaten in the early evening 5 o clock or 6 o clock. So this is why some people call their midday meal their dinner and their evening meal their tea. So why this difference? It certainly isn t that all the working class people live in the North, Wales, Scotland or the Midlands or rural Ireland and that the upper class people live in the south of the UK. That wouldn t be true. But it does reflect the areas where there was industrialization. So industry means lots of factories making clothes, steel, building ships or later on making cars. And towns formed to serve these industries. So these would have been areas where the people were known as working class, with their own traditions. And in the south of the UK, perhaps people didn t feel so strongly about being working class. They were happy to be thought of as middle class, so they adopted the term dinner for their evening meal. Another difference is with the word supper. This is another word for a meal, but again means different things in different parts of the UK. When I was young and growing up in the north of England, in a very working class area, anything you ate or drank just before bedtime would be known as supper. So supper was eaten really late at night. It might have been a hot chocolate drink and a biscuit. But if you are truly middle or upper class, then supper tends to mean your evening meal, the big meal that you eat at home in the evening around 8 o clock (what most people call Copyright Adept English Production reference: A00052 Page 3
dinner). So if someone says supper to mean their evening meal, it could be that they re quite posh. The other possibility to be aware of, is that if someone invites you for tea, then depending on the time of day, they may just mean a cup of tea. Drinking tea is very popular in Britain. A good cup of tea is something we take quite seriously. So sometimes when the usage of English words is confusing, it s because there s a bit of history behind it, there is a story behind it, so it s helpful to know the story. Anything to do with the British class system is difficult. Some people would argue that we don t have [social] classes now. Others would argue that we really do. The good news from your point of view is and I mean as someone who doesn t come from the UK at all you don t get judged by it, unless you ve lived here a very long time. If you have an accent which shows that you re not from the UK, it means you re exempt, you get a free pass so to speak. So it shouldn t count against you. In that respect, I m much more likely to be judged by the British social class system than you are, because my accent is slightly northern, and especially if I call my evening meal my tea! Anyway, enough for now, have a lovely day. Goodbye! Why do people call dinner tea? 17-Dec-2010 Why do people call dinner tea? First, let s jump on the time machine back to the Edwardian days, when it all started. The Upper Classes had a light afternoon tea at 4.30pm and dinner at 8.00pm. However; the working classes would come back from work and needed a large meal. They had dinner at the time when the upper classes were having afternoon tea, so called their dinner tea. How is it now? If you call it tea, and eat it at around 6.30pm, you are almost certainly working class or of working class origin. (If you have a tendency to personalize the meal, calling it my tea, our/us tea and your tea as in I must be going home for my tea, what s for our tea, love? or Come back to mine for your tea you are probably northern working class.) Copyright Adept English Production reference: A00052 Page 4
If you call the evening meal dinner, and eat it at around 7.00pm, you are probably lower-middle or middle-middle class. If you normally only use the term dinner for rather more formal evening meals, and call your informal, family evening meal supper (pronounced suppah ), you are probably upper-middle or upper class. The timing of these meals tends to be more flexible, but a family supper is generally eaten at around 7.30pm, while a dinner would usually be later, from 8.30pm onwards. Watching the English, Kate Fox, Hodder 2004 In the North of England, North and South Wales, the English Midlands, Scotland and in rural and working class areas of Ireland, people traditionally call their midday meal dinner and their evening meal tea (served around 6 pm), whereas the upper social classes would call the midday meal lunch or luncheon and the... 9 down vote In the UK, dinner would normally refer to the main meal of the day, irrespective of the time of day at which it is eaten. It could, for example, be eaten around midday ("lunch time"!), early evening or later evening. The discussion at "Lunch" vs. "dinner" vs. "supper" times and meanings? already adequately covers that subject. Tea on the other hand can mean several difference things: 1. It may simply refer to the drink. 2. It may refer to Afternoon tea, which is a particular style of light meal, traditionally eaten at Tea time. 3. It may refer to a main meal, traditionally known as High tea and eaten in the early evening. If, for example, you were asked Would you like some tea?, it would most likely mean Would you like a drink of tea? but could - depending on the time of day and the situtation - refer to Afternoon tea. Certainly, one would expect a Tea Shop in the UK (as distinct from a Coffee Shop) to serve traditional Afternoon teas, as well as just serving tea to drink. Copyright Adept English Production reference: A00052 Page 5
Traditionally, Afternoon tea would have been observed by middle and upper classes - and especially by the ladies of those classes. It would consist of tea (to drink) served from a china teapot and drunk from delicate china cups, accompanied by delicate savoury or sweet sandwiches (stereotypically, cucumber sandwiches and jam sandwiches), or scones with jam & cream, and followed by cakes (often homemade). Some people and families continue to have their main Sunday meal at midday - when it is commonly referred to as Sunday lunch despite being the main meal of the day - and may then have Sunday Afternoon tea as described above. Many may do this more during the winter and/or when having visitors, rather than regularly. High tea is so-called to distinguish it from Afternoon tea. Traditionally, it was a meal eaten in the early evening, and consisting of a hot dish, followed by cakes and bread, butter and jam. It has tended to be associated more with Northern England and the working class, although sometimes the meal would have been eaten by children of the middle & upper classes, whose parents would have eaten a more formal dinner later in the evening. There is more information at the Wikipedia entry for Tea (meal), from where some of the above information has been taken. Copyright 2017 Adept English All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this text to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this text is offered or sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author nor Adept English will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this text. Adept English has endeavoured to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this text by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Adept English cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. Copyright Adept English Production reference: A00052 Page 6
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