Back in the day, the noon/midday meal was called dinner also in the US. Particularly in rural areas.
And for some of us boomers it’s still dinner. Growing up on a farm, Breakfast was 6am-ish thing after chores were done, (you could sneak in some jelly toast before chores if you weren’t to lazy to get up early enough), the noon dinner, and you always came home to eat it, was a full meal deal because you had spent your morning often doing heavy manual labor. Plus your afternoon was going to be no different. You got lunch a 4pm because supper was a 7pm-ish meal, (often heavy on the “ish” part depending on what went wrong during the afternoon).
We evidently didn’t get the memo about changing dinner to lunch until much, much later. Besides, we would have needed to rename “lunch” to something else for the 4pm break. I still call the noon meal dinner to this day. You can call it whatever you like, because I don’t sweat those details.
My great uncle got embarassed over this early on in his career. His boss invited him to dinner on Saturday and so he showed up with his wife around noon since that was the typical understanding in his home region. The boss thought he was crazy and told him off for arriving hours earlier than expected.
They still call the midday meal dinner and the later one supper, though I say lunch for the middle one and use the words dinner & supper interchangeably.
In my rural midwestern US family, “dinner” meant the largest meal of the day, frequently with our extended family, almost always at my grandparents’ house.
“Sunday dinner” was midday, right after church. This was typically pot roast in the cold months and barbecue in the summer.
On weekdays, dinner was in the evening after everyone came home from work and school. We had a big family dinner at least a couple of times per week when I was a kid. (My grandma and sometimes my great aunts would do the cooking. In hindsight, I think my mom and my uncle struggled financially after their respective divorces, and this was the older generation’s way of helping them out.)
Holiday dinners were usually midday, unless someone had to work and we needed to plan around that.
If we were talking about the meal at a specific time of day, we used “lunch” or “supper,” since “dinner” was ambiguous.
Back in the day, the noon/midday meal was called dinner also in the US. Particularly in rural areas. And for some of us boomers it’s still dinner. Growing up on a farm, Breakfast was 6am-ish thing after chores were done, (you could sneak in some jelly toast before chores if you weren’t to lazy to get up early enough), the noon dinner, and you always came home to eat it, was a full meal deal because you had spent your morning often doing heavy manual labor. Plus your afternoon was going to be no different. You got lunch a 4pm because supper was a 7pm-ish meal, (often heavy on the “ish” part depending on what went wrong during the afternoon).
We evidently didn’t get the memo about changing dinner to lunch until much, much later. Besides, we would have needed to rename “lunch” to something else for the 4pm break. I still call the noon meal dinner to this day. You can call it whatever you like, because I don’t sweat those details.
My great uncle got embarassed over this early on in his career. His boss invited him to dinner on Saturday and so he showed up with his wife around noon since that was the typical understanding in his home region. The boss thought he was crazy and told him off for arriving hours earlier than expected.
They still call the midday meal dinner and the later one supper, though I say lunch for the middle one and use the words dinner & supper interchangeably.
In my rural midwestern US family, “dinner” meant the largest meal of the day, frequently with our extended family, almost always at my grandparents’ house.
“Sunday dinner” was midday, right after church. This was typically pot roast in the cold months and barbecue in the summer.
On weekdays, dinner was in the evening after everyone came home from work and school. We had a big family dinner at least a couple of times per week when I was a kid. (My grandma and sometimes my great aunts would do the cooking. In hindsight, I think my mom and my uncle struggled financially after their respective divorces, and this was the older generation’s way of helping them out.)
Holiday dinners were usually midday, unless someone had to work and we needed to plan around that.
If we were talking about the meal at a specific time of day, we used “lunch” or “supper,” since “dinner” was ambiguous.