07.18.06

Being a (Not So) Brief Rumination on ‘Luncheon’ and Related Mealtime and Diurnal Terminology

Posted in Whatever, History at 9:08 pm by Spencer

Having recently used the word “luncheon,” and being a sometimes word nerd, I decided to look into it.

As per ye olde Wikipedia: “In medieval England, there are references to nuncheon, a non hench according to OED [the Oxford English Dictionary, yo], a noon draught — of ale, with bread — an extra meal between midday dinner and supper…” I suspect I’m not alone in feeling that a true olde English nuncheon of bread and ale around mid-afternoon sounds just about perfect.

Of course, here “dinner” is what most us folks call “lunch,” though as Wikipedia once again points out “dinner” actually means simply the biggest meal of the day (at whatever time), and even more formally (esp. outside the US) “dinner” is any meal with multiple courses. “Supper” (descended from the French souper and, obviously, related to soup) typically is the evening meal, though again with some regional/national (and sometimes even economic class) variance. This usage — “dinner” as lunch and “supper” as big evening meal — is, if I read all this right, essentially British and classically Southern US. (Which makes perfect sense given the Britain > Apalachia > South/Midwest migration of the old times; cf. bluegrass music.) I remember as a child ca. the very early ’70s in Indianapolis (stone’s throw from the Mason-Dixon Line) being schooled in this usage by my slightly-older and then-best-friend Mary Lumsey.

Ah, but I digress! (This, naturally, being approximately three-fifths of the fun of word-nerding. By the way, I highly recommend playing with a huge, old dictionary while tripping.) But before I proceed, I simply must mention the wonderful word tiffin, which sounds rather like a kind of pudding but actually means, basically, a “portable light midday meal.” The word entered currency in India during the British colonial period, being a bastardization of the older English slang word “tiffing” which itself means taking a sip. As you might imagine, tiffin is largely a working class phenomenon.

I looked up the oh-so-enticing word “nuncheon” in my 1955 edition of the Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles (impressively bulky but not hernia-and-myopia-inducing like the OED), which reports it is a “slight refrehsment of liquor, etc., originally taken in the afternoon.” The root “shench,” from the Old English “scenc,” means draught or cup.

Sometime around the industrial revolution, with its (relative) burgeoning of the upper classes, “luncheon” came to refer (at least in England) to midday meal gatherings held by Ladies, who were forbidden by custom to eat in restaurants. (Not-so-funny, ain’t it, how women could only serve meals and not be served themselves?) This usage and custom continued well into the mid-20th century and, indeed, was so equated with women that once (again according to the Wikipedia) “when the Prince of Wales stopped to eat a dainty luncheon with lady friends, he was laughed at for this effeminacy.”

What is perhaps most amazing when one delves into the argot of mealtimes is just how much people used to eat. There was breakfast in the morning, second breakfast (in Germania and Scandavia…and Middle Earth) or elevenses (in England) around 10:30 or 11 AM, then dinner or tiffin or lunch at midday, followed by tea or nuncheon in mid-afternoon, capped by dinner in the evening. Among the upper classes in the late 19th century, dinner could be a truly gut-busting affair. If you’re curious about it, the thoroughly engrossing book Devil in the White City takes some delight in reciting the truly overwhelming menus of 1895-period dodeca-course dinners in the upper aeries of Chicago society. Obesity was a stereotypical trait of the upper classes, invoked by everyone from Charles Dickens to Thomas Nast. What I find (tragically) interesting is we modern Americans supposedly eat fewer meals and yet are ubiquitously plagued with obesity, especially among the lower economic classes. (Here I inevitably think of my dear olde friend Tom, who coined the delightful if dismaying term “Indiana Butt Disease” and, I think, the phrase “Gravy is a beverage.”) In the space of less than a century, obesity as a defining characteristic shifted from the very richest to the poorest and even the middle class. I would be remiss to not refer passingly here to corners of African American culture that extoll “big asses” as the paramount of sexy, though I’ll not comment further on it, being a suitably white-guilty honky motherfucker.

But yea, all this talk of midday naturally brings us to mind of the word noon and its original meanings. By navigating my faithful 1955 Oxford Universal Dictionary I learn the word is derived from ancient English and, duh, Latin, words meaning…nine of all things. Indeed, in England circa 1420 noon meant the “ninth hour of the day, reckoned from sunrise according to the Roman method, or [brace yourself] about 3 p.m.” This obviously assumes sunrise occurring at 6 AM. As a resident of Seattle, located at a relatively far northern latitude, this would mean that during winter time, my local “noon” (by 15th century reckonging) would be more like, oh, 5 PM or so.

Beginning around 1560, says my faithful Oxford Universal, and evidently extending at least to 1709, “noon” could also refer to something called the “hour or office of Nones,” which I gather is a typically Brit-cryptic way of meaning “office hours.” The term Nones apparently originates from Roman antiquity and means (in typically randomistic fashion) the “ninth day…before the Ides of each month, being thus the 7th of March, May, July, and October, and the 5th of all other months.” What confounds me here is that while studying Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser in high school, I was instructed that the famous “Ides of March” basically meant sometime around the 15th. This is clarified by the selfsame Oxford Universal, which informs me that “ides” means (in the ancient Roman calendar) the eighth day after the nones. Clearly these are the same lead-besotted, adlepated bastards who coined such completely misleading grammarial rules of thumb as “i before e except after c.” How fitting, then, that “nonens” means “something which has no existence; a nonentity.”

In any case, Oxford Universal 1955 amorphously implies the definitional shift of “noon” to mean 12 of the clock (i.e. o’clock) “probably” had something to do with “anticipation of the eccl. office.” Clearly a reference to the Church…with a possible veiled invocation of mechical clocks…except I thought the Church saw clocks as the work of Satan (bloody typical).

Interestingly, by the very earliest of the 1600s some sort of linquistic fad took hold whereby “noon” also applied to the night, namely midnight or, even, “the place of the moon at midnight.” Could this be the end-of-life influence of courtly alchemist and spy John Dee?

Fugifino.

Finally, here is a pointer to “What Time is Dinner?” (History Magazine, Oct.-Nov. 2001) which explores the evolution of mealtimes.

Bon appetit!

Post scriptum: If you ask real nice, I’ll excavate and post my even longer etymological treatise on “corned beef”!

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