[Ads-l] Yet Further Antedating of "Lunch"

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 6, 2015, at 7:40 AM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:

> Yes, David must be correct here.  As I was drifting off to sleep last night I started to realize that the 1677 citation might be in the OED sense _lunch_ n.2 1.

See especially the second cite there:

1600   R. Surflet tr. C. Estienne & J. Liébault Maison Rustique vii. xxv. 850   He shall take breade and cut it into little lunches [Fr. loppins] into a pan with cheese.

and also the remark in the etymology that 
"the word first appears as a rendering of the (at that time) like-sounding Spanish _lonja_ slice of ham"

It was another two centuries plus before sense 2, "lunch" as a truncation of _luncheon_, appeared.

LH



> I had been fooled by the presence of the word "luncheon" in the 1677 citation, not realizing that "luncheon" also had an earlier sense of a piece or hunk.
> 
> Fred Shapiro
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of David Daniel [david at COARSECOURSES.COM]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2015 7:11 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Yet Further Antedating of "Lunch"
> 
> Yeah, but hold your horses there. This isn't lunch as in a meal or even a
> snack; this is lunch as in a big piece of bread. Cf. the French translation
> (assuming the French translation was correct). Like: "He carried a lunch in
> his pack and was constantly eating pieces of it throughout the day." IOW, if
> he had a ham hock in his pack it wouldn't be a lunch, if you see what I
> mean.
> DAD
> 
> 
> 
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Yet Further Antedating of "Lunch"
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
> 
> Wow.
> 
> This looks like another example of an innocuous and presumably familiar
> word that for inexplicable reasons of chance (and perhaps of writerly
> "decorum") rarely appeared in print for many, many decades after its
> introduction.
> 
> JL
> 
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
> wrote:
> 
>> Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Yet Further Antedating of "Lunch"
>> 
>> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
>> 
>> lunch (OED, n.2 2.a., 1829)
>> 
>> 1677 Guy Miege _A New Dictionary French and English_ (Early English Books
>> O=
>> nline)  A LUNCH, or luncheon of bread, grosse tranche de pain.
>> 
>> Fred Shapiro
>> 
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