to be pissed off with people who refer to their evening meal...

[Einsteinnolonger]

as 'Dinner' and not 'Tea'.

supper is any informal evening meal

Lunch is lunch

majority of people I know call supper "tea".

I just can't learn it, "tea" is something you drink or you might have with cake and a visitor.

Dinner is more formal evening meal, I rarely need to use the word in my own house.

To avoid just this clash of cultures I invited people round 'for a meal' or 'something to eat' and they can call it what they like depending on what time of day it is

Mine had school lunch. Sorry

Tea we call it. Dinner is at lunch time. Never really thought about it before... Got me worrying that I'm not properly spoken now!

Jeeps I'm hungry now...........

YABU
It's supper, of course.

notrightnow, exactly. Although food round my house is definitely NOT in the River Cafe 'oh, I just threw it together and it happened to come out looking like a food-porn mag' mould. It is genuinely thrown together from whatever came in the veg box plus what I could find at the Turkish shop, and cooked in the easiest manner possible. But there's ALWAYS pudding, whether it be some posh chocolate or one of my rare but fabulous crumbles

supper.
my mother and father called it 'supper'.
it's hard to unlearn that kind of thing.

I grew up saying dinner and tea, but DS1 has, from somewhere, learned lunch and dinner. We now normally have lunch in the middle of the day and tea at 6ish. Supper is what you call having toast / sandwich / entire bar of Dairy Milk in between tea and going to bed.

I have never been to a dinner party, or indeed been invited round for supper. I am not a proper grown up

To be honest, they could call it 'wangdangdoodlefuck' as long as I get fed.

When I grew up in the north "tea" was the evening meal and "dinner" was at lunchtime.

When I moved down south I found that "dinner" meant evening meal and "tea" meant a light snack earlier in the evening/late afternoon, while "lunch" was the midday meal.

It's a north/south thing - never occurred to me to get "pissed off" about it. Am I missing something?

BooJonesMummy Tue 19-Apr-11 11:08:33
Tea we call it. Dinner is at lunch time. Never really thought about it before... Got me worrying that I'm not properly spoken now!

Just saw this - see my previous post! I clearly wasn't properly spoken as a child either!

Calling the evening meal "tea" makes me nutty.

And everyone asking "what's for tea mam" makes me cringe.
Sorry! And my husband is from Sunderland so I hear this too often!

Calling your evening meal "Supper" is what old fashioned folks in the midwest do, also cringeworthy when said in some kansas city drawl.

Had this argument with an ex-girlfriend, who took OP's side.

The evening meal is supper.

Tea is something I have with milk and two sugars.

Dinner is the main meal of the day. (Look it up in a dictionary.) Lunch or supper can be dinner. When I was at school lunch was dinner. When at home (growing up) dinner was as suppertime, except on Sunday, when it was at lunchtime.

A neighbour once invited me and my visiting parents to tea, we were slightly surprised when "tea" consisted of a vegetarian Indian meal. I refrained from adding milk and sugar.

We have our tea at 5ish, if eating later/and or going out it's dinner, never supper. Supper is a bowl of cereal or piece of toast for the kids before bedtime. 1 p.m is lunch. It's starter & pudding.

It's school meals not school dinners as in 'free school meals', so there

Actually Chris, just had a little look at several definitions and everyone refers to Dinner being a meal you can eat at any time of the day. One refers to dinner as historically being the main meal of the day eated around noon.

So us northerners are historically corect then

lol at "luncheon"

Really? Pissed off? Get a life!

I like regional/'class' etc differences in how we say things. Can't imagine why it would piss people off. Life would be so dull if we all used prescribed language - and hard to identify characters in radio plays.

So, should I inform my friends that they have been invited to a 'tea' party on Saturday night, then? Bit odd. They'll think they're getting jelly and icecream and not what I planned to cook for my 'dinner' party.

And what about that programme on TV called, Dinner Dates? Should it be re-named Tea Dates? Doesn't quite fit, does it?

Wet and makes you feel queasy? Really?

How strange. When I think of all the strapping young Welsh farmer types who eat "supper" the mind boggles as to how you find it wet TBH

My supper's not wet. Unless it's soup.

I used to go to school with a girl who had "tea" as soon as she got home from school followed by dinner with her parents a few hours later.