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.

Recently, there was a posting at See One, Do One, Teach One regarding the release of IE7. If you look closely at the comments, they were infiltrated by an Apple enthusiast, namely Quinn (What’s cooking at Tech-Recipes). I feel bad for him, no one responded to his commentary, I am sure he is suffering from being left out. We can’t have that, can we?

First, you need to understand that Quinn has slipped way into the dark side, as seen in his post about getting his new MacBook Pro (see Christmas in October?). The poor guy’s mind has obviously been poisoned. I recommended that he pick up a Bible and note that an apple was the downfall of man. If you look at Apple’s logo, you realize that they even flaunt that point by using an apple with a bite out of it. When confronted on this, he did make a valid point of the fact that the word apple isn’t mentioned in Genesis, but then fell back into a Mac-trance and stated that the pictures of Eve holding an apple were all some marketing spin by Microsoft. He then went to Google and did some research with the following results:

“microsoft is evil” -> 54,100 results

“apple is evil” -> 647 results

“bill gates is satan” -> 490 results

“steve jobs is satan” -> 45 results

Obviously, his Mac-trance induced state is telling him that more people think that Microsoft is the bad guy. I, however, see a much different message in these search results. The Google results show that Apple users write far more garbage than do Microsoft users. It really isn’t their fault though. It probably is coming out of a mixture of boredom and frustration stemming from having to use the software. Microsoft users are far more productive and therefore have much less time or reason to write such material and post it on the web.

Now, as far as his comments on IE7. First of all, IE7 is designed to run on quality operating systems, that is why you found no download for your system. I’m sorry for this, hopefully they will be able to find some way to lower its requirements. I was going to try OS X, but found that none of my important and necessary software would run on it. I guess they are trying to reduce their requirements as well.

Now for my top ten list, we’ll aim at what’s wrong with OS X (exercising my creative license):

1. Responsible for the U.S. dependency on fossil fuels.
2. Responsible for the depletion of the Amazon Rain Forest.
3. Disguised itself as IE7 and put diesel fuel in Quinn’s gasoline vehicle.
4. Created nicotine and caffeine addiction.
5. Secret distributor of all news stories found in the National Enquirer.
6. Responsible for anal leakage being an acceptable side effect of fat substitutes.
7. Originator of every bit of spam in your inbox.
8. Responsible for placing Little Richard in that Geico commercial.
9. Created all political ads that interrupt your TV shows.
10. Causes gingivitis and tooth decay.

Okay Quinn, I know you’re itching to get back at me. Just remember to type slowly so your laptop can keep up with you.