Make Dinner Lunch Again! And Two Other Etymological Anecdotes
1: These days dinner is supper, but dinner used to be lunch. We, collectively, should reclaim lunch for dinner. "How can dinner be lunch?" you might ask. "Supper and dinner are the same?" Not so dear boy! Back in ye olde days, when our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents worked from home in the fields to "feed themselves and their families," they used to get up really early and take time to eat their Big Meal in the afternoon so they'd be able to work more in the afternoon. Then everyone ate the small and informal "supper" before dark. A fun fact about supper is that it was usually soup and is thusly derived from the Old French word for soup. Anyway how did it become dinner? Not totally clear but it seems like it has to do with a) lighting, and b) capitalism—at various points in time in different places, folks stopped working at home and started working elsewhere, and were unable to come home in the middle of the day to make dinner (lunch) or even spend time eating a large meal since they were not getting paid for that time. Since gas and oil lighting also common, these folks were able to cook and eat later at night more regularly. The european royals who didn't have to go to work also moved their dinner to suppertime but only because the lighting let them party later. I think it would be nice if we went back to eating dinner for lunch though and supper later. Maybe even adopted the siesta. What's that? You want to know where "lunch" came from? Tough luck my boy, nobody knows! 2: A month or so ago I woke up in the middle of the night so I could type into google "is tissue names after sneeze sound" and immediately fall back asleep. Presumably earlier I had sneezed and gotten a tissue and thought, "tissue sounds a lot like my sneeze" which is kind of true in the sense thay my sneeze sounds less like "Ahh-Choo" and more like "(ah)Tschiooo" which sounds kind of like "tissue." Anyway it was all for naught because "tissue" comes from Old French "tissu" which means "woven" and comes from the latin word for weaving. And to make maters worse, tissues for sneezing only come about later in reference to "tissue paper" whereas before tissues were used for other things and handkerchiefs were used for wiping your nose. 3: On the topic of onomatopoeia, guess where the word "piss" comes from. Gross!