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In polite company in Britain one asks ones guest if they have time for a coffee - usually if it is morning. But if it is afternoon one would ask them if they would like a cup of tea.

Now this is not about why we drink coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon, but why it is that we elide cup of when speaking of coffee, but that it is essentially included when speaking of tea.

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  • We can drink coffee mostly with plastic or paper cups nowadays while we drink tea only in "traditional ceramic cups"? Coffee is now mostly used as "countable" noun, I guess, although it used to be uncountable.
    – user140086
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 10:27
  • @Rathony But we can and do drink tea out of plastic cups too. But I am not really talking about places where you can do that. In Kath's Kafe or Tesco's cafeteria we may well ask for two teas, and one coffee (except that nowadays coffee in such places has evolved a dreadful foreign nomenclature involving latte, cappuccino, etc). But I am talking here about such as tea with the vicar. Now there you would be offered a cup of tea, or a coffee.
    – WS2
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 11:00
  • I agree. Just a trend, I guess.
    – user140086
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 11:06
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    @Rathony I don't think it is a 'trend'. It has always been the case as long as I remember - which is quite a while!
    – WS2
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 11:19
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    Because tea is ceremonial, and the cup is a more important part of the the ceremony than the tea itself.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 11:54

1 Answer 1

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Because in British usage, tea can also mean a light meal taken in the afternoon.

By taking a cup of tea, we are differentiating the action from taking tea. We are not offering to provide a meal.

There is no meal called coffee, so a cup of coffee can be considered to be redundant.

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    I had been considering this myself and there may be something in it. Anyway it is worth a vote. But you also have to consider that we talk about having a beer, a sherry or a whisky, but never a wine , rather a glass of wine. So I think there is something more to it than what you suggest.
    – WS2
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 17:27
  • @WS2 An interesting series of cultural associations and usages. There's a suggestion that offering tea or having tea creates an ambiguity in countries where tea is also refers to an evening meal. On the same basis an invitation to have a wine might in some contexts be misunderstood to be an invitation to express an opinion (whine), or be very well understood (but incorrectly) as a pejorative observation about the character of a person so addressed. But in respect of beer , we equally might understand what is meant when offered a pint and know that we don't mean milk.
    – John Mack
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 19:51
  • @JohnMack Would you care for a whine? I hadn't thought of that - but rather like it! What a hilarious sense of ambiguity you have.
    – WS2
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 20:04

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