cooking roadkill for tea

[Sally Donlon]

I think it depends on one's particular cultural heritage and in the
American South, of course, we lean quite heavily to the Scots/Irish.

My family often spoke of having "tea," especially if we ate "dinner"
before 8 p.m., which was the general rule in my house. In fact, we
always had "tea" instead if we had an early engagement that required
us to eat something at around 4-5 p.m. to hold us over through the
big event. Then, we'd "graze" when we got home.

And, if forced to choose between the "early bird special" or "tea,"
I'd probably still lean toward "tea."

Sally O. Donlon


On Oct 30, 2006, at 3:57 AM, Lynne Murphy wrote:

> I have a little collection going (for a future blog entry) of
> "quotations"
> from print media that I strongly suspect are not direct quotations
> because
> they contain lexical items from the 'wrong' (UK/US) dialect.  (I'd do
> grammatical changes too, but haven't got any in my collection.)  For
> example, American rock stars are often quoted in the UK press
> talking about
> their "mums", rather than their "moms".  (Some people count that as
> just a
> spelling difference--but I think it's a proper lexical difference.)
>
> I came across this one, "spoken" by a member of the Gossip.  It's a
> Portland, OR band, but 2/3 of them (including the quotee) are from
> rural
> Arkansas.  The quotation goes:
>
> "If my dad hit a deer in his car, he'd just say 'sweet!'" grins Brace.
> "Then he'd drive home with it on the hood and we'd cook it for
> tea."  [The
> Guide (The Guardian), Oct 28-Nov 3 2006]
>
> Do people from Arkansas use 'tea' as a name for an early evening
> meal?  I
> have the suspicion that he said 'dinner', but that that was deemed
> by the
> writer to sound too formal for the picture of hickdom that he was
> trying to
> paint.  (I've been told here how 'charming' it is that we colonials
> say we
> have dinner every day.)
>
> Of course, they did keep the Americanism "hood".  The punctuation
> is also
> weird (non-standard British), but that's another matter!
>
> Incidentally, if you come across any such oddly-dialected quotations,
> you're most welcome to pass them my way.
>
> Best,
> Lynne
>
> Dr M Lynne Murphy
> Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
> Linguistics and English Language
> Arts B135
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QN
>
> phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
> http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org