supper or dinner, what do you call that meal?

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:16 PM -0500 12/11/00, Sonja L. Lanehart wrote:
>My husband and I have had this discussion before. He is from
>Minnesota where apparently dinner is what you do at noon and supper
>is what you do at night. I come from Texas and lunch is what you do
>at noon and dinner is what you do at night. Now that we have a child,
>somehow I thought it better that we be on the same page so I use
>supper now as well for what you do at night though I still use lunch
>for what you do at noon since that's what they call it the schools
>he's attended here in Georgia and California.  --SL
>
Then there's the cross-cultural lesson that I received as an urban
child:  in rural areas, I was told, dinner--i.e. the main meal of the
day--is served at mid-day.  In urban and suburban areas, dinner--the
main meal--is served in the evening.  (The "other" post-noon meal is
then called supper and lunch respectively.)   The explanation had to
do with the idea that the farm workers come back to the house for the
mid-day meal which has to be big enough to keep them working until
sundown, while the city folks don't come home until the end of their
workday.  (That "dinner" really means 'main meal of the day' and is
not definitionally tied to time of consumption is borne out by the
fact that the Thanskgiving turkey or Christmas ham or roast may be
served in the early afternoon as the big holiday DINNER--it would
never be called 'lunch', since that would falsely entail that there's
a bigger meal coming later in the day.

larry