Having ‘a cuppa’

[ConstantlyFuriosa]

Why does this sentence infuriate me so? I already know I’m probably being unreasonable but it’s so grating. I can’t be the only one?

Don’t use most of these phrases myself but I can’t get worked up if people do, my dd does so it’s not an older generation thing, it’s to do with friendship groups, work colleagues etc. (she bizarrely has a different accent to myself and my other dd, slightly akin to her father but not really.

Supper makes me think of cheese on toast. Mmmm

Yes. I grew up in Yorkshire and it was dinner in the middle of the day and tea in the evening.

Because it feels gross in my mouth when I say it and I hate the sound of the word when someone else says it!

🤢🤣

I just say ‘we’re going out tonight for something to eat’!

I don’t know anyone who has ever used the word cuppa. I actually thought it disappeared after the seventies. Isn’t it from the era of Carry On films? Sounds cosy.

Yes I very much like a cuppa

In Scotland we have High Tea.

I'm not crazy about the word "meal" either. There's something very mean and parsimonious about it.

Have lunch, have dinner/supper, have some food etc. "Meal" makes it sound like something measured out according to WW2 rationing rules.

So how do you indicate it came from the chippy rather than cooked at home?

That is Edinburgh. On the west coast we feed folk.

The chip van's in the village, shall we get fish and chips?
Let's get fish and chips on the way home.
Here's some money, go and get fish and chips love.
Can't be arsed cooking, shall we have fish and chips?

If I said we were going to have fish and chips for dinner they'd know I was not cooking them because I don't think I've ever cooked fish and chips. I've cooked fish and I've cooked fish, but not together.

Prefix it with "takeaway".

What word would you use? It’s surely just descriptive, which isn’t the same as “cuppa”, “hubby” etc?

I'm from the West!

I thought it was more the Highlands to be honest. I think it's also a Nordic version of 'hospitality' although slightly less brusque.

Would you ask for “a pint”?

My ex MIL repeats cuppa teeeeaaaa multiple times in a cockney accent. Nooiccceeee cuppa teeeeea.

We are not cockney. We are not even English.

It drove me around the absolute BEND.

Tea (as in food) in the evening here too. I am enjoying the usual southern English patrolling of threads to declare their version correct.

I very much enjoyed the TV show 'Back In Time for Tea' which hung on an understanding that this meant around 5pm.

I'd ask for a pint of lager.

Otherwise I might be given a pint of bitter or cider.

The word was my point…if they don’t use the word I don’t know which it is. I was wondering why the word irritates you when it’s so useful. But you’ve said it’s irrational, so I guess that’s answered.

I now live south-ish. I say tea , my children say tea and my DH (brought up in Wales with parents from London) says tea. It's pretty widespread.

Supper on the other hand is not as widespread and is for posh people and people form Edinburgh (who are often posh by default) like my stepmother and my dad who is a posh Geordie but only started saying supper when he married the Edinburgh woman to my knowledge.

I read a book once that explained basically that the elite kept their place in society by eating later than their workers - to me , posh people eat quite late.

This is all complicated by my American DM who called everything whatever.

My cousin's husband died the other week way before his time and the funeral was last week. He came from Wigan.

We went out to the sound of I Want A Chippy Tea by the Lancashire Hotpots. The food at the wake was a Chippy Tea. It was teatime, too.

Oh Haha. Just remembered my dad said 'din dins'. There's one for you OP!

That must come from posh childhoods. (his dad was a motorbike mechanic as it goes but my gran tried to pretend otherwise- presumably by sending my dad to a fee paying school where people said din dins for evening meals.)

We've variously said all of "dinner", "supper" and "tea", depending on mood and frame of mind. I'm from a Southern English, MC background but my OH is working class Northern Irish by background, although he's lived in both the North and the South of England over many years.

It really doesn't matter. We don't do ourselves any favours as a nation by being so pathetically fussy about this, like something out of the Mitford era. Live and let live.

Yes!

I had to stop reading anything Martin Lewis wrote because of his infuriating way of shortening everything and chocs just makes me think of him. Choccy is even worse and it just makes people look so thick.

Ok that’s very specific to you. If you knew someone that both cooked fish and chips and got them from a chippy, and if you don’t wish to specify what order those in your family might want from the chippy (fish, sausage, scampi, haggis etc) surely “chippy tea” is the correct descriptor?