Synth noodling conceptual artist
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So, you agree with me. It is a North South thing?
There’s a degree of that, but having lived all over the UK in the last 50 years, I can tell you it really is a North/South thing.
Errr… That’s not what I’m saying chief. I’m saying you are right, just that things have changed in usage.
The wiki article actually says that too.
Maybe it’s a culture thing, but that comes across as a wildly patronising comment from someone who just wandered into a conversation about “not the US” and started talking about the US.
Are we both talking about the UK here?
Ice and sugar in tea feels distinctly not British at all.
I’m sure. Although I’ve never met anyone who uses breakfast dinner dinner.
Like, seriously, I can’t imagine living like that.
What you’ve done there is confuse what I was describing as usage with historical context.
What you just said is like saying, “actually Gay really means just happy”.
I mean, yes, it did, but now not so much.
And that’s the difference between descriptive and prescriptive usage.
David Foster Wallace talks about it a fair bit in one of his essays. Prescriptive description of English usage being somewhat colonial and, to an extent, authoritarian as well as being particularly useless on the ground, so to speak.
So yeah, it was that way around, but try using it that way round now and see how far you get.
Yep, and that industrial revolution is responsible for the N/S split in terms too, the factories of the north and all that.
Oh yeah, that’s definitely a thing too!
Explanation if any of our foreign cousins want it.
Tea, short for tea time.
In the South you used to (and still do) have the following three meals a day:
Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
In the North, however…
Breakfast, dinner, tea.
Both might tie the end of the day off with supper too. Brunch is for the jobless middle class and wandered into the conversation with yuppies in the 80s.
There’s also a tea break, which is usually just a cup (or mug if you are a ruffian) of tea. Not to be confused with tea time, where you might reasonably expect to eat your dinner.
Then there’s high tea, which yes, features tea. Often a pot and almost never a mug. It frequently comes with anemic sandwiches and perhaps a scone.
I hope that clears things up.
Sure, the volume might be less, but the quality doesn’t falter.
I left Reddit for you, and no regrets.
“What’s you’re biggest weakness?”
“I’m going to say my honesty”
“Not sure I think honesty is really a weakness…”
“I don’t give fuck what you think.”.
Ok, then I’m sorry.
There’s a thing about any conversation online being interrupted by Americans making it about themselves and saying some incredibly patronising things… And that phrase is really only ever heard as that here.
But I see this might not be the case, so I apologise for my hostility there.