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I like to eat potato chips and grapes at the same time, but of I eat them around family members or friends they just give me a look and say its disgusting. I think it tastes fine. Is it normal?
Yes, of course. Sweet and salty can work really well in combination (which is why we have salted toffee, ham and pineapple, bacon and maple syrup).
People would accept it if you were eating crisps with salsa. There's not a huge amount of difference between that and eating crisps/chips with fruit.
I'm of the opinion that English speakers around the world should use "crisps" to mean the thin potato snacks (what we call "chips" in America) and "fries" to mean the fried potato sticks (which are called "chips" in the UK, if I understand correctly). The word "chips" will be reserved for poker chips and damaged areas of paint or pottery, and we can avoid all this confusion about what kinds of snacks people are eating.
It'd be nice if there was some kind of standardisation, but it'd never come from British convention as much as American convention. As a Brit, my idea(s) of chips are different to anyone else in the world because we've partially adopted your word, but only in specific circumstances.
Doritos are chips and Pringles are probably chips. Kettle chips are definitely chips despite being closer to what we'd call crisps. Our regular potato crisps aren't made from an emulsion like chips are. They're just a real piece of potato, fried. But then we have all kinds of things we'd call crisps but which are really fried corn emulsion shaped like a space invader or something.
When I say potato crisps, I mean something like this:
<a href="http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff231/bour3/things%20I%20made%20then%20ate/potato_chips.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff231/bour3/...</a>
(note they're called chips in the image name) :)
Chips and fries are confusing too. If I ask for fish and chips, more often than not I now get fries. Chips are significantly bigger, usually (but not always) less crispy and there's more emphasis on vinegar than salt. When I think of fish and chips, I mean this:
<a href="http://www.hartleysfishandchips.co.uk/resources/fish-n-chips.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.hartleysfishandchips.co.uk/resources...</a>
I had to look hard for that because most of the pictures had what looked suspiciously like "oven chips", which are also wrong. What I often get is this:
<a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/2976703153_f41584b6c2_o.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/2976703153_...</a>
...which is completely wrong.
The only place where there's no chip/crisp crossover is when we eat them on bread. A chip barm, or chip butty is the kind of chips which come with fish, and a crisp butty could mean Pringles (even though they're chips).
Confusing, isn't it? :)
Oh, wow. The chips/crisps/fries confusion is much more complicated than I realised. Here in the US, there are different types of french fries, but most of them are just listed as "fries" or "french fries" on menu. "Fries" can mean larger french fries, like these crinkle cut fries http://www.zaxbys.com/images/menu/Side-Fries.jpg which are thicker (but not all thick fries are crinkle cut in a zigzag like that), and which I think are what you would usually call "chips". It can also mean thinner fries, like the kind you get at McDonald's, or even these ridiculously tiny Steak n Shake fries http://www.hatersbehatin.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/steakfries.jpg
Also, I just looked up "chip butty". Is this something people there eat often? Here, I've only seen fries on sandwiches at what we call "fat sandwich" shops, which are shops where they sell comically unhealthy sandwiches with everything you can think of on them. I haven't seen them in the South, but I think they have them in the North Eastern US.
We probably used to eat chip butties more when there were proper fish and chip shops. We always tended to have bread and butter with our fish and chips and the chips that were left over got made into a sandwich (just to keep them together and warm, and because chip butties are nice).
You know, when you resolve the crisp thing, you might have to do something about puddings. I understand it means something very different there. To us, it's mainly this:
http://www.deli-fina.com/puddings.html
Or it can be full of meat, like this:
http://www.greatbritishpuddingcompany.co.uk/
And just to really confuse you, it can also be this:
http://www.findlayofportobello.co.uk/index.php?_a=product&product_id=57
Here, pudding is usually a dessert made of milk, eggs (or cornstarch), sugar, and vanilla or other flavouring. It's similar to custard, but the desserts we call "custard" are usually thicker and have more egg yolk than pudding. Some puddings, like banana pudding, are kind of like trifle. Banana pudding is made with vanilla pudding, sliced bananas, vanilla wafers, and sometimes whipped cream in layers.
My grandmother tells me that in the South, we have a traditional sort of dish called "liver pudding", also known as "livermush". We also have bread pudding, but those are the only puddings I know of here that are puddings in the British sense (except for black pudding, which isn't widely eaten around here).
The strange thing is that when I read up on puddings just now, I didn't find any alternate names for American type puddings. They're not exactly the same thing as custard or Bavarian cream, so I'm not sure how to specify.