Dinner Versus Supper: The Data
Jake from Kentucky wrote that when he moved to Norfolk, Virginia, he was labeled a hillbilly for calling the last meal of the day "supper" instead of "dinner." He said, "To me ‘dinner’ and ‘lunch’ meant the same thing,
only dinner was more so. You have a lunch in the school cafeteria. You
have Thanksgiving dinner at the same time, but because there's more to eat,
it's a dinner and not a lunch.”Jake from Kentucky wrote that when he moved to Norfolk, Virginia, he was labeled a hillbilly for calling the last meal of the day "supper" instead of "dinner." He said, "To me ‘dinner’ and ‘lunch’ meant the same thing,
I just shrugged
and said, ‘It's called the Last Supper not the Last Dinner’ and then because I
care more than I probably should about what others think about me, I just call
it ‘chow’ regardless of the time it's being served.”
People have
asked me about this before: What is the difference between “dinner” and
“supper”?
Fortunately, dialect
researchers have surveyed thousands of Americans about what they think the difference is between “dinner” and “supper.”
First, “supper” is far less
commonly used in the western United States. It’s more of a southern, eastern, and midwestern
phenomenon.
Digging into the data, about a
third of respondents think the words “dinner” and “supper" mean the same
thing and describe the evening meal.
Another third don’t use the
word “supper” at all, and I fall into that category, probably because I’ve
lived my whole life in the non-“supper”-using western US.
Where it gets more ambiguous
is at the midday meal. Most people today call the midday meal “lunch,” but
about seven percent of people said they’d call the midday meal “dinner,” and nobody
seems to call the midday meal “supper.” So that’s one way “dinner” and “supper”
differ: Although both can be the evening meal, only “dinner” can be a midday
meal.
Jake seems to fall into either
the eight percent of people who say dinner is the biggest meal of the day no
matter what time you have it or the 12 percent who say dinner takes place in a
more formal setting than supper.
The roots of the difference go back to farming
culture. On farms, dinner was a heavy meal that laborers ate to sustain themselves
through a long afternoon. Its use has changed with modern life, but as we’ve
seen, it can still suggest a heavy evening meal, while supper can be lighter
evening fare.
It’s interesting because the decline of the use of the word “supper” in
published books is very similar to the decline in the number of farms in the US according to the US Department of Commerce
and the USDA. The charts look similar. Both the use of the word “supper” and
the number of farms began to decline around the mid-1930s and continued to
decline until about 1975 when they both seemed to level out.
I think it’s fair to say that “supper” means different things to
different people these days, and it’s less common than it used to be now that
we have fewer farms.
Chow
I got curious
about Jake’s new chosen word for a meal—“chow”— and it turns out to have a
surprising origin. It was originally used to refer to just Chinese food because
apparently, Chinese people in California in the 1800s used the phrase “chow-chow”
to refer to food, and that eventually got shortened to just “chow” and the
meaning expanded in English to include all kinds of food.
Pidgin
Specifically,
sources say “chow-chow” came from Chinese pidgin English. A pidgin is a
language that develops so that two groups who speak different languages but end
up in close proximity to each other can communicate. It’s nobody’s first
language, and it’s a simplified language.
Pidgins often arise when two groups are trying to do business with each
other—to trade goods and services, and according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the word “pidgin” also arose in the 1800s to
describe these kinds of simplified languages and comes from the way Chinese
people pronounced the word “business,” or at least the way it sounded to
English speakers. “Business” became “bigeon,” which became “pidgin.” So you can
think of a pidgin language as a simplified business language that helps
different cultures trade with each other.
Thanks again to Jake
for the question. I’m sorry people called you a hillbilly. The fact that you
use “supper” just means that it’s more likely that you grew up with people or
in an area that had a farming history.https://www.quickanddirtytips.com
Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl and the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips. Check out her New York Times best-seller, “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.”