Pan-fried.... I'm always pleased to know it's been fried in a pan, not held in the hand over a roaring flame.
What the frick else was it going to be fried in ffs? The wreck of the QE2?

See also 'oven roasted'. Yeah, that's how you roast things - in an effin oven. Not in a small Japanese hatchback.

Er, first it doesn't need translating. "The midday meal" is already in English.

But OK, let Google translate do some random translating, and see what it turns up:


Hmm. Maybe Google Translate is just doing that to spite you. Let's try another one.







You can get as indignant as you like, but there is no universal usage, or universal answer, and I think my view - that much depends on the size of the meal, and when the eater has their main meal of the day - is fair and accurate.

Your point about translations is in fact disingenuous, as any translator, when faced with the word for a given meal in a foreign language, will only provide a translation which is [ihis understanding[/i of the English equivalent. Which for obvious reasons will be heavily influenced by (a) who taught him English and their predilections and/or (b) whereabouts in English speaking lands he has lived (if at all). As my varying examples above clearly show.

But it's not just me. Somebody asked the question to Gareth Rees on the BBC learning site. This is what he had to say:



I'm going along with that as the best answer of modern usage.

I have to say I was going on how my foreign colleagues translated into English rather than Google Translate (which is far from infallible). A quick play around does come up with some surprising results that don't tally with how Germans and French - for example - actually use the terms. Speaking of German, mittagessen does translate to lunch in english and abendessen translates to dinner. I knew there was a reason why I liked Germans.


I wasn't getting indignant at all, merely pointing out that you appeared to be moving some goalposts. And in practice I find that most people still tend to call the midday meal lunch regardless of how large it might be - the exception typically being a traditional Sunday roast for some reason.


His description does not reflect my daily experience over the last 50 years or so spent in a variety of geographical locations. If I had to produce a list of the most common meal descriptors in chronological order it would be something along the lines of:

Breakfast
Brunch
Lunch
Tea
Dinner
Supper

Although tea and dinner are somewhat interchangeable, and the above list doesn't apply to Hobbits.

My daughter's school in Leeds (pronounced lids) has a paradoxical system of 'lunch-buddies' to help the little monkeys eat the gruel, overseen by 'Dinner-ladies'.

How do you work that out? The literal translation is pretty much midday meal and evening meal.

That only partly works for me.
Dinner may well have been the word for the main meal regardless of what time of day it was taken but I reckon usage has drifted since then.
Lunch has drifted into meaning the midday meal in some geographical areas, even where they mean a proper sit-down thing with cutlery and everything.
I'm sticking with dinner at or around midday and tea in early evening, regardless of size or content.

For some classes, supper is in the evening, like dinner, but is informal.
I guess my tea would be supper to them and dinner to some others.

Thanks to my daughter's swimming training we now have our tea at around 7:30-7:45pm! If we call it dinner, does that make us posh?

Yes. Even my rudimentary German is capable of a literal translation of those two words. However Google Translate, which we were talking about at that point, translates them to lunch and dinner respectively. As does every German I have ever spoken to.

Yeah, and we fought two massive wars to stop them imposing their ways on us. That's what it was all about, right?

I thought it was all about that bloke Archie Duke who shot an ostrich because he was hungry. Or was that only the first one?

I'm sorry Kosh ... but the terms suggested by a piece of American software or what Germans think is the right word in English are hardly what we'd term definitive.

My (admittedly old ) Shorter OED has "Dinner" as "The chief meal of the day, eaten originally, and still by the majority of people, about the middle of the day (cf. Ger. [iMittagessen[/i), but now, by the professional and fashionable classes, usually in the evening; particularly a formally arranged meal of various courses, a repast given publicly in honour of soemone, or to celebrate some event".

If only German students of English would use the OED instead of Langenscheidts, eh ?

But no it doesn't! I'm reasonably fluent in German, but wouldn't really need to be to understand that "lunch" is NOT a literal translation of "mittagessen" - a literal translation would be "mid-day eating" or "mid-day food". Therefore if you choose to "translate" that as "dinner", or "lunch", you are adding precisely nothing to the argument as simply your choice of which English word to use is, obviously, the one you use. It's a purely circular argument. If I translated "mittagessen" from German then it woudl depend on what type-of mid-day eating I had in mind.


In my experience posher people tend to use "lunch" but I am certain that very few adults that work standard hours have their main meal at dinnertime (sorry, mid-day) and so referring to it as "lunch" is both reasonable, and a more accurate description than dinner.

Whereas for a schoolchild having a hot 2 course meal, a "school dinner" is a much better description, as crisps, an apple and a fruit juice in a box would be a "packed lunch", and not at all a "packed dinner", even if at exactly the same time of day.


Interesting, but totally irrelevant, as someone once said. Unless you can explain why your personal experience has greater validity?



You see, you can't do it. The reason you are having to immediately backtrack on your own list is that basically NOBODY would ever have their tea, and then go on to have a proper dinner, with the exception of the minority to whom "tea" means "afternoon tea".

Brunch is also a posh word, nobody in Bradford has brunch. If you want to use the posh lexicon, where are elevenses?

Hang on hang on hang on, you have NEVER quizzed every German you have ever spoken to on how they personally translate those words, so stop fibbing! Why on earth would you ever have done such a bizarre thing?

I do find though that practically all Germans I have spoken to who've learned English as opposed to American, have been polluted by posh southern jessy English anyway, so it's hardly a surprise if their efforts amount to trying to talk a bit posh, even though it can be very funny listening to their efforts to pronounce their "u"s as "a"s.

I spent Monday through Wednesday working at a semiconductor fab in Regensburg. The midday meal in the staff canteen offered a huge range of options including 4 different hot meals. The majority of my German colleagues had three courses (if you count salad) and universally referred to the meal as lunch.

The same is true of large companies I work with here in the UK also.

If I suggest to a colleague that we have a dinner meeting, not a single one of them will ask me if I mean midday or evening. And they'll all turn up at the right time.


Elevenses are at 11am of course. I missed them out as I haven't heard the word used in quite a while - not since my kids were small in fact.

And brunch may have been posh once, but the world has moved on (well - most of it) and now it's just slang for a meal taken somewhere between breakfast and lunch.

I tend to agree. But then I wasn't the one who introduced Google into the debate.


The etymology of words used to describe meals and mealtimes is actually pretty interesting. But the discussion has been about what's in general use now.

This.

How Germans translate their words into English is utterly irrelevant.
You couldn't translate their very literal un-nuanced [umittagessen[/u and [iabendessen[/i into anything meaningful in English other than a literal, un-nuanced midday-food and evening-food.
Why are we talking about Germans? They know little about food anyway.
Except when it comes to Kaffee und Kuchen (*) ... then they are streets ahread.


(*) Which translates correctly as Coffee and Cake ... regardless of time of day, although late afternoon is best.

How could you possibly know that? Maybe it's a hobby of mine. Or perhaps I moonlight as a social historian.




Germans colloquially translate mittagessen as lunch because the majority of English speech they are exposed to equates lunch with midday and dinner with evening. Which was kinda what I was saying.

If you want to dig back far enough BTW, dinner was actually breakfast. It only moved to midday (and eventually evening) as people became soft enough to need three meals a day instead of two.

True, fair point, but let's remember that a dictionary records usage rather than defines it.
But then, the age of my dictionary rather fuxup my point there.

Try telling that to Germans.

And it's entirely relevant to my original contention as an example of a large region of the world that describes lunch and dinner in their correct sequence.


Literally nobody uses literal translations in everyday speech. Literally.


I like German food. What's not to like about lots of meat and dairy products with a liberal helping of fried potatoes? My arteries and waistline tend to disagree but I haven't listened to those spoilsports in years.

And you missed out the beer. Weissbeer and Dunkels are some of my favourite beers.

That irrefutable font, Wikipedia, says ... [iOriginally, dinner referred to the first meal of a two-meal day, a heavy meal occurring about noon, which broke the night's fast in the new day. The word is from the Old French (ca 1300) disner, meaning "breakfast", from the stem of Gallo-Romance desjunare ("to break one's fast"icon_wink.gif, from Latin dis- ("undo"icon_wink.gif + Late Latin ieiunare ("to fast"icon_wink.gif, from Latin ieiunus ("fasting, hungry"icon_wink.gif.[3[4 The Spanish word "desayuno", the Romanian "dejun", and the French "déjeuner" retain this etymology (such as Portuguese "desjejum", while referring to breakfast). Eventually, the term shifted to referring to the heavy main meal of the day, even if it had been preceded by a breakfast meal.[/i


... which mean it's breakfast anyway.


You know what, I'm leaning towards what someone posted earlier, i.e. it being the main meal, regardless of whether it's at dinnertime or teatime.
Which, of course, means that I must now exclude "lunchtime" from my vocab.
There ... it's gone.

You're going to miss a lot of meetings. And a fair number of meals.

I must admit that when I did German Literature at A-level being extremely surprised at the fact that anyone could get any sort of lyrical or nuanced qualities into literary works, but they do, although it's very different. But you've got to love the sheer practicality of German wordsmiths - don't invent a series of sounds, just knock some individual words together into compounds and that'll do. However blunt. Tell it like it is! Don't hold back! Why get clever? What's wrong with bustenhalter?

Meat? It ain't "meat", it's FLESH! (Fleisch)

Want a contraceptive? Just ask for a Schwangerschaftverhütungsmittel ("pregnancy prevention means"icon_wink.gif

And indeed the result is that they often do it better than other languages.
Which says more - Pollution? or Umweltverschmutzung ("environment filthying"icon_wink.gif. Even if you can't understand a word of German, you just know that's a Bad Thing, right?

And on occasions, we just admit we can't beat them, and adopt their creation.
Schadenfreude, anyone?

And if you have a big breakfast and then sandwiches for the rest of the day does that mean you have dinner for breakfast?

What about a night-shift worker eating roast beef & Yorkshires at 06.30: is that breakfast, lunch, dinner or tea?

More pertinently, does it fooking matter?

Lived in various locations in and around London for 22 yrs now and it's generally accepted by those closest to me that its breakfast dinner and tea. If we go out in the evening we go out for a "meal". We often use the term Brunch at the weekend on lazy days. We have Sunday dinner for a roast meal. Or simply state we are having a "roast dinner".
That said my wife states its breakfast lunch and dinner. Though she gets stumped when I ask her who looks after the kids at school between 12pm and 1pm.
What we have to remember is that these sayings evolved in a different era when the working week was so very much different to what it is today.
But as Cody says who cares. The true English language is a evolving and fluid beast. That's its beauty. Yes it can be ised by Americans but equally the Australians and their shocking soaps have had an effect over the past 25 years and the list goes on.