h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I didn't know coffee tables served any other purpose that foot resting in front of the TV...
You mean they actually have a function in the kitchen that in some way involves coffee?!
Here I have spent the past 30 years on this planet believing that the coffee table was so named because you can sit coffee mugs on it while watching morning news programs on TV!

Thanks for the new bit of knowledge!

I think that the kitchen table has become a little confused with the coffee table but that is perfectly understandable. Ie they will both have balanced on them too much unanswered post, old newspapers, mugs, teaspoons, crumbs etc.
A bit like fruit bowls, they never just have fruit in them do they? Also contain pens, pennies, bits of unidentifiable plastic, pegs, drawing pins, etc etc.
So anyway. Coffee tables - The road to always having a living room that looks untidy is to have a really big coffee table. I've got one! It's in this room somewhere but I can't see it, I can just see a pile of paper etc.

Kitchen tables are a bit less specialised - they can store either ornamental junk, semi-useful junk such as might accumulate briefly during the manufacture of a cake or pie, newspapers and empty envelopes used in the ritual of looking-at-the-post whilst drinking-coffee-and-being-grouchy-in-the-morning and sometimes serve no other purpose than to provide a surface onto which plants may be placed. The kitchen usually has a number of other surfaces for use as a table such as the top of the microwave, the little space between the top of the washing machine and the work surface, the top of the fridge, the little nook behind the pot in which wooden spoons live, the tops of cupboards (if there remains any space after all the never-used pans have been put there), the ends of windowsills and the many, many drawers in the average kitchen; only one of these is used for cutlery, the rest succumbing to old batteries, newspapers you half-want to keep as there's half an interesting article in it somewhere, placemats that you never use unless your mother is coming to visit, Congs (see Liff) and other unidentifiable utensil-type objects and the various long, thin boxes associated with foil, clingfilm, greaseproof paper, freezerbags and the little twisty things used to fasten bags of frozen brownness and electrical flexes. Some kitchens that hope to exude an air of orderliness will store their clingfilm, foil and greaseproof paper in a little rack thing screwed to the wall in an unreachable place. In fact, this increases the overall mess of the kitchen due to the fact that people together enough to buy a little rack-thing and put things in it are together enough to save all the odd-shaped bits of foil and paper rescued or remaindered from cooking or baking processes, which they must keep in one of the drawers.
If a kitchen is both neat enough and bereft-of-coffee-table-in-front-of-the-TV-in-the-living-room enough to have a virtually empty kitchen table from which people eat their meals regularly, it is almost certain that they will have copper-bottomed fake antique-rustic pans hanging from the walls, dried flowery things hanging next to the window, massive spice racks bolted to the underside of cupboards and vast amounts of meaningless crap magnetised to the front of the fridge, just so that people have something to look at instead of a television when eating.