Dinner and Supper

Well, Martha, it’s time for some leftovers.

We got a lot of feedback on a call we took a few weeks ago about dinner versus supper.

Did you see all those emails?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

They just kept coming.

They did, and comments on the discussion forum, too.

A lot of people said that dinner is the largest meal of the day, period, no matter what time of day it’s eaten.

And, in fact, many mainstream dictionaries, if you look it up, do say that, that dinner is the main meal of the day, whether it’s the middle of the day or the end of the day.

Of course, the problem here is that a lot of people said something different.

We got an email from Andy in Independence, Missouri, and he spoke for a lot of listeners when he wrote about meals during his childhood.

He put it this way.

He said, during the week, the meals were breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but on Sunday, they’d be breakfast, dinner, and supper.

Dinner, he says, was for the formal Sunday meal only.

Donna in Indiana, however, wrote to say, on our farm, meals are breakfast, dinner at noon, and supper in the evening.

Lunch is something we serve to the men mid-afternoon, perhaps in the house, but often either sent to the field with them or taken to them.

Lots of listeners agreed with her, too.

Then there’s Karen in San Diego.

Karen wrote to say, my husband and I grew up in Oklahoma where the evening meal was and still is referred to as dinner.

Supper was occasionally used for a very late meal eaten after dinner.

She also says, my husband did not hear the evening meal regularly called supper until he went east to Connecticut to attend Yale.

And we have never heard the noon meal referred to as dinner anywhere we’ve lived.

Grant, who knew there was so much to say about breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

We all have an opinion on food and when to eat it, right?

Well, that’s true.

If you look, though, at the Dictionary of American Regional English, you’ll see that they have a map there of dinner and supper.

You’ll see that for much of the country, dinner is simply the evening meal.

That’s probably the majority of people in the United States.

But for parts of the lower Mississippi Valley states and the South Atlantic states, it’s a bit more commonly used as a word for the midday meal.

So, to summarize all of this, this is a dispute about usage.

It falls into the same category as soda versus pop versus Coke and so forth.

There’s what you know and there’s what you don’t know and usually what you know seems right.

In this case, it depends on the day of the week, the size of the meal, whether you’re in the city or on a farm, and where in this great nation you live, or Canada.

Wow, that’s a lot of variables.

I loved it, though, because everybody did chime in.

They had something to say on the subject.

And we did a survey without really meaning to do a survey.

I know.

We could map this all out, and we’d have data points, right?

Yeah, it was amazing.

It really was.

We always welcome your feedback about our calls.

Whether you think we got it right or we got it wrong, we want to hear from you.

The number is 1-877-929-9673. And you can send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

And furthermore, you can always leave your comments for everyone to see at our discussion forum at waywordradio.org/discussion.