阅读理解
I
use tea to refer to a snack(点心)taken in the late afternoon or early evening (ie after getting home
from work but before the main meal, which I call dinner) and I don't think that's rare(罕见)at
all. I think the difference is when you originally had your main meal and I
would agree that it's a class thing, not a north/south thing(I've heard the
midday meal referred to as both lunch and
dinner by different people in all areas of England).
Dinner was always the main meal. In the
past, working class men worked near(or even at)home and came home for their
main meal at midday, and so that was their dinner.
Middle class men worked in offices far from their homes(often working in the
city centre, and living outside the city) and so couldn't go home for a meal at
midday. They therefore had a light meal at midday and had their main meal with
their family in the evening after they go home from work, so dinner was in the evening. Because most
children at state schools were working class, we still use dinner for school meals. For middle and upper class people, tea was
a light snack served in the mid-afternoon at which ladies(who didn't, of
course, go out to work)could entertain their friends. For working class
people, however, tea was the light
snack you had before going to bed. Supper,
for all classes, was the light snack you had before going to bed.
However, because work patterns changed and
many working class people started eating their main meal in the evening too, dinner, tea and supper started to
become interchangeable for them. Also many working class families have since
become middle class, so the terms have become less of a current class thing(if
class still exists at all) and more of a system of terminology inherited(家族术语)from grandparents etc, different from family to family. When I was
a child(Southern English, middle class family, but with working class
forebears(祖先)) we called the midday meal dinner and the evening meal tea, but when I was in my early teens I
had a new stepfather(from a family that had always been middle class for
generations)who used lunch and dinner, and that's what I've used ever
since.