Sanas of Naked Lunch

[Daniel Cassidy]

Naked Lunch

Lunch is a word-perfect example of how the orthodoxy of  so-called
"scientific etymology" mirrors the 19th and 20th century  Oxford-Ivy league orthodoxy of
 "scientific racism;" wing-nut  etymologies that read like a genealogy of the
 German English Royal family, who lunch for a living. But first, the  lowly
lunch of Irish and Scots-Gaelic.

Lunch
Lo/in-fheis (Pron. lown-hesh, the “fh" ="h" slender “s” =  “sh”)
A feast of meat (Dineen, p. 675)

Lo/n, g. lo/in,  pl. id., lo/nta, lo/inte, m., Food, meats,  provisions,
supplies, stores;  diet, dinner. “The Gael of old, like the other ancient nations,
had but one meal  or diet daily – the lo/n.” (Dwelly, p. 598).

Lo/in-fheis  (Pron. lown-esh), a feast of meat, is found in an Irish aisling
or “dream poem,”  Aisling Meic Conglinne, edited by Kuno Meyer in 1892.
(Dineen, p. xxiii)

Luncheon
Lo/in-fheis a/n      (Pron.  lowneshan)
A noble, “royal” feast of meat and dainties.

A/n, adj : noble. The adjective A/n is a  highfalutin word  like the moniker
Windsor (from the  Old German Battenburg.) So the callow young prince's Nazi
costume  was really a family heirloom.

Oxford  Dictionary's Hunch on "Lunch"

The Oxford Dictionary of  English Etymology gives the origin of “lunch” and “
luncheon” as first appearing  “towards the end of the 16th century in the
sense of a ‘thick piece, hunch,  hunk; perhaps – Spanish lonja slice, the
longer form being probably an extension  on the analogy of punch and puncheon,
trunch and truncheon. The sense “slight  repast between morning meals’ appears
XVIIth C., for luncheon, and first in form  lunchin’(g); the present use of
lunch (XIX) is a shortening of this whence lunch  vb. (p. 540)

Barnhart, the American etymological dictionary, also traces the word
luncheon to a word meaning a “thick piece, or hunk,” claiming the source  is an
obscure North English dialect in the 17th century. Of  course,  neither scientific
etymological dictionary provides a  single citation for their source. When
you wallpaper the discourse,  who needs steenking  citations? Oxford goes with a
Spanish word lonja,  for a slice, while Barnhart connects lunch to
Proto-Germanic “skankon” and Old  English “scanca,” meaning a hollow bone used to draw
booze out of a cask. So  from lunch to hunk to hollow bone. A skankon
etymology.

This  "scientific" etymology of Lunch really has to be read in full to be
believed. Though I would never question an Oxford English professor's lunch  or
faith.

Luncheon, n. 1580 luncheon a thick piece, hunk; later, a light meal
(lunching before 1652 and luncheon, 1706). The semantic development was probably
influenced by North English lunch hunk of bread or cheese; the morphological
development may have been by alteration of dialectical Nuncheon light meal,
developed from Middle English nonechenche, nonschench (1342), a compound of none
NOON + schench drink, from Old English scenc, from scencan pour out. Old
English  scencan is cognate with Old Frisian skenka pour out, Old saxon, skenkian,
Middle  Dutch scencen (Modern Dutch schenken), and Old High German skenken
(modern  German einschenken), from Proto-Germanic skankjanan draw off (liquor),
formed  from skankon shinbone, SHANK (in Old English scanca), “ a hollow
bone...and  hence a pipe, a pipe thrust into a cask to tap it.” (W.W. Skeat).
(Barnhart, p.  615)


Lunch, n. 1829, shortened form of  luncheon. -V. eat lunch. 1823 in Issac
Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature (no  pg citation); from the noun. though of
preceding date. —lunchroom n. (1830,  American English) –lunchtime n., (1859,
in George Eliot’s Letters).

Lunch
Lo/in-fheis (pron. lownesh)
Feast of meat, food, and  dainties.

Free lo/in-fheis (lunch.)



Daniel Cassidy
The Irish Studies Program
New College of  Clifornia
San Francisco
1.19.05