Dinner or tea?

[ddlp]

So, my friend (from the south) is adamant that your evening meal is called dinner, but I (being from the north) call it tea... is not dinner taken at lunch time... and if not why are dinner ladies at school called dinner ladies?

[inferno]

Of course you are right. And while we are about it, how do you pronounce scone?

[treaclefight]

and bath and grass........we'll have to settle for everyone being right or everyone being wrong. if its the queens english maybe the softie southerners are closer to being right :-)

[molly]

Dinner is the cooked meal of the day. Soup, main course, pudding. (of course we don't always have all three courses). Some people have this meal at lunch time, and some people have it at tea time.

[andy hughes]

It's all down to local usage (I say scone to rhyme with stone by the way) and to me, dinner is the mid-day meal, and people who call it 'lunch' are just being posh, but it is a matter of what you feel comfortable with, and don't be put off by pedants from other regions!

[Cetti]

Miss treacle - I am a roughie toughie Dorset lass(we ain't soft in these parts :D!! )

I admit it's very confusing and tend to agree that we all get it right - and wrong. Schooldays dinner was midday, now it's in the evening. My Mum called the evening meal tea, I've always called it dinner, but unless you move in the sort of circles that look down their noses if you get a word wrong, according to them that is - call it what you like.

[Quizmonster]

Here's what the word-bible, the OED, has to say on the matter. "Dinner...The chief meal of the day eaten originally - and still by the majority of people - about the middle of the day but now, by the professional and fashionable classes, usually in the evening."

There are several telling words in that definition...originally, majority and classes. Basically, we all call meals what we do according to our upbringing. However, given the original meaning as a midday meal, one cannot be 'wrong' to call lunch 'dinner'...most people do. However, if one has any aspirations of a social nature one had better stop forthwith!

[treaclefight]

cetti im a londoner, i promote the southern softie thing coz i like it when people find out hard way that we're anything but.... :-D

[Greedyfly]

I call it Dinner but I am from the South, although, now living up north and the whole pronunciation and 'different' words baffles me.

[paulz]

bath has an invisible R in it and ovens down here are pronounced as Aga's :+)

[Cetti]

Now if you want to be super posh you must call it Supper if you eat in the evening, because according to my dictionary that is the correct name for the last meal of the day.

[Janetex]

My cousin and I grew up virtually in one family, never lived far from each other and see each other regularly. He invited me to dinner, phone rang at lunch time that day - you can guess the rest. He hit me on the head with the family Oxford saying that I should know better, expecially as it was a Sunday. I go by times - lunch at lunch time, tea at tea time, dinner at dinner time, sugar at suppertime. (We're Irish tho, anything for an argument.)

[gazzawazza]

Ddlp, I couldn't agree more, dinner is at dinner time and tea is at teatime (teatime)!

And if we go out for a meal in the evening we're not "going out to dinner" as posh people call it but we're doing exactly that, going out for a meal!

[incitatus]

this is one of those evolutionary terms. It is nonsense to say that the original cooked meal was at lunchtime for any but a privileged few. Dinner (if we agree that this is the cooked meal, which I think is fair) would be when you came home from the fields, or the factory, or before that dragged the antelope back to the cave. Eating evolved as the working ( or in the case of the middle and upper classes, lazing) day evolved. The rise of factory dwellings, factory canteens and later school meals is the origin of dinner-at-midday. For the chattering classes it never moved much, it was always in the evening. with the rise of commuting this became a social event too. as husbands took longer to come home, dinner got later, and turned into an evening party. which is when the third meal, "tea" arrived, in the eighteenth century, as poor little wifelets couldnt wait till dinner without fainting. For posh folk, by the end of the nineteenth century, the evolution of the mealtimes gave us breakfast, lunch, high tea, dinner and supper if you were peckish late at night.

[dave_in_cw]

If I had to ask a girl out to a restaurant in the evening "for tea" I think she could be forgiven for thinking I was a complete nutter. Of course I am from the south (of Africa).

[blanx]

Incidentally at Scone Palace they pronounce it Scoon