Digital Streets

It seems that lately I have been constantly exposed to the interchangeability of the words dinner and supper.  Both are periodically used to describe the evening meal, however, I have found that some regions of the country use them differently.  I remember being quite confused when I was a kid because I was very used to the three meals being breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But then we would visit my grandparents in Oklahoma and the names were changed slightly: breakfast, dinner, and supper.  I couldn’t figure out why we were eating dinner for lunch and why was this new term, “supper” being used to describe dinner?

I have noticed some of the recent tweets from fellow tech-recipes bloggers have referred to these words, seamonkey420 used supper to describe the evening meal, while Q used the term dinner.  Co-workers of mine also utilize the words differently.  So I felt that it was time to look at this a little further (since obviously I couldn’t find anything better to do!).  Unfortunately, my hope of finding a clear cut answer as to the correct phrase became quite clouded in the early stages of my research. 

Wikipedia defines supper as: “the name for the evening meal in some dialects of English - ordinarily the last meal of the day, usually the meal that comes after dinner.”  It further states that the term “is derived from the French souper, which is still used for this meal in Canadian French and sometimes in Belgian French. It is related to soup. It is also related to the German word for soup, Suppe.”  Seems pretty simple, right?  I thought so until I looked up dinner. 

Wikipedia defines dinner as “the main meal of the day, usually eaten around the evening but some cultures have it in the afternoon. The meal normally consists of a combination of cooked animal or vegetarian proteins (meat, fish or soy), vegetables, and starch products like rice, noodles, or potatoes.”  Here’s where things go horribly wrong. The word “dinner” comes from “the French word dîner, the ‘chief repast of the day’, ultimately from the Latin disiunare, which means to break fast (as in the English word “breakfast”). ”  In fact the American Heritage Dictionary, states that the word “dinner” referred to breakfast in Middle English.  I’m not liking this since I’d much rather have eggs instead of fish and rice for the first meal of the day.

So let me see if I get this straight, dinner isn’t lunch and dinner isn’t supper, dinner is breakfast???  And since supper is defined to be the meal that comes after dinner, then supper is lunch.  So what is the evening meal called??

I think it’ll be easier to let people call it whatever they want and I’ll just look at my watch to decipher what meal they are referring to.