Firstly, a question: If someone says “Come to my house for tea,” what do they mean?
Secondly, a confession. I’m not merely a native English speaker: I am actually English, for which I apologize. I apologize for two reasons:
1) That’s what English people do: apologizing is our unofficial national sport.
2) I’m really sorry to have to tell you that in England our language is complicated not only by regional variations – which is to be expected – and generational (age) variations – which I have already mentioned to you in my piece on “Long” – but also by socio-economic/cultural variations.
What does this mean? It means that the type of language English people use also varies according to their category of life-style – the things they and their friends and family tend to choose to do, have to do and couldn’t imagine not doing. We call these categories “class”, and we arrange them from the habits, needs and tastes we associate with people with the least money and worst jobs (“working class”) all the way up to those we traditionally associate with the people with the most money and, often, no real jobs at all (“upper class”).
In between these two extremes you will find most of the English population, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that all of those millions in-between are simply “middle class”: there are lower-middle-class, middle-middle-class and upper-middle-class English people, all of them secretly, furiously determined to distance themselves from the class immediately below them. Anthropologist Kate Fox has described how, for example, upper-middle-class people like to demonstrate to the world that they are definitely not middle-middle class through the way they socialize, dress, decorate their homes, eat and, most of all, speak.
In the bible we find a story of two warring tribes: the Gileadites, it seems, were able to identify (and then eliminate) members of the enemy tribe, the Ephraimites, by asking them to pronounce the Hebrew word “shibboleth”- the poor Ephraimites, you see, were fatally unable to say the “sh” sound (/ʃ/). We now use the word shibboleth to describe a word that reveals something about the speaker. Kate Fox identifies 7 shibboleths that upper-middle people use to identify members of that inferior race, the middle-middle class. Five of these are words that upper-middle-class people simply hate, and never use: pardon,toilet, lounge, settee, and serviette. The other two are words that the two classes use in different ways.Sweet may be the last course of a meal for lower-middle- and middle-middle-class people, but never for upper-middles, who finish their meals with pudding; the other word is dinner.
Dinner is a complicated word. You might think it simply means evening meal, and so it does. Sometimes. For upper-middle-class people it can only mean this, but when the meal is a simple, friendly or family event, maybe eaten in the kitchen, they prefer to call it supper. For some middle-middle- and lower-middle-class people, and most working-class people, dinner is usually the midday meal (in other words dinner = lunch) – which is why you’ll hear the expression school dinners – although for other members of the non-upper middle classes, it’s a generic word for the main hot meal of the day, whenever you choose to have it.
So, if you have your dinner at lunch-time, and you’re not “upper” (or posh) enough to call your evening meal supper, what do you call it? Tea.
Confused? Me too. That’s why I conducted a Facebook survey of English-speaking friends from 3 continents and a variety of English class backgrounds, with the aim of answering the question at the beginning of this article. What, if you’re invited for tea, can you expect? As you’ll have understood by now, it depends on who is doing the inviting:
1: If they’re American, it means a cup of tea, the famously “English” hot drink of Chinese/Indian origin. Whether you get a cookie or a blueberry muffin with it is up to your host. If Americans mean “snack”, they’ll say “snack”.
2: If they’re from Australia or New Zealand, tea will probably mean a main evening meal, generally sometime between 6pm and 7pm, unless they specify “afternoon tea” or “morning tea” which are light snacks, mid-am or mid-pm, accompanied by a cup of the aforementioned brown stuff.
3: If they’re upper-class or upper-middle-class English people, they’ll probably mean a cup of tea and cakes at around 4-5pm. They might say “high tea”, which suggests (a): there will be cucumber sandwiches or something even more substantial, yet not-quite-meal-like, and (b): they think it’s still the 1950s.
4: If you’re in the South of England, and your host is not upper class, and the people eating are children, it will probably be their main evening meal, eaten around 5-6pm.
5: If the invitation involves the phrase “your tea” (eg: “come over to ours for your tea”), you are probably being invited, by someone (not upper-, and probably not upper-middle-class) from a region of the United Kingdom that isn’t the South-East, for a main evening meal, probably not later than 6.30-7pm.
6: In all other cases in the British Isles, it seems that tea is statistically more likely to be an early-ish main evening meal than a between-meals snack, although if you’re already in someone’s house and they offer you tea, they probably mean the drink. If your (rather mean) host is inviting you to their house for
just a drink they will specify a cup of tea. That way, the addition of a biscuit will make them seem generous.
Comments