| 词组 | lunch, luncheon |
| 释义 | lunch, luncheon It seems hard to believe now, but people once looked down their noses at lunch: • This word ... may at the best be accounted an inelegant abbreviation of luncheon —Ayres 1881 The relative merits of lunch and luncheon provoked at least a few arguments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our files include a clipping from an unidentified newspaper of the 1920s that tells the story of one such argument—between the American writer William Dean Howells, who liked lunch, and his wife, who preferred luncheon. To settle the dispute, they looked in the Century Dictionary: • "Lunch is preferred!" cried Mr. Howells. "And who do you think," he slyly added, "is given as an authority?" "Who?" "William Dean Howells," answered that gentleman. "Oh, he's no authority!" smartly retorted his wife. The OED observed in 1903 that lunch was "Now the usual word exc. in specially formal use, though many persons still object to it as vulgar." Lunch is still the usual word, of course, and its propriety is no longer called into question. Luncheon now usually refers to a formal midday meal for a group of people, often as part of a meeting or as a way of entertaining a guest: • He has been honored at half a dozen public luncheons and banquets —Joe Alex Morris, Saturday Evening Post, 10 July 1954 • Attorney General Robert Kennedy, during a luncheon conference with several newspaper editors — Malcolm X, Evergreen, December 1967 Luncheon also has occasional use as a somewhat formal synonym of lunch: • Luncheon is $ 12.50 and includes, for example cream of mushroom soup, supreme of chicken with mustard sauce and a selection from the dessert table — Wallace Turner, TV. Y. Times, 15 Jan. 1984 But lunch itself is not a notably informal word. It is, simply, an ordinary, everyday word, like breakfast, that is in constant use as both a noun and as a verb: • ... Blass lunches at the best restaurants —Current Biography, September 1966 • As the lunch crowd drifted away —Gail Sheehy, New York, 24 Apr. 1972 • ... small tobacco tins containing money for lunch — Anthony Bailey, New Yorker, 29 Oct. 1973 • ... for the benefit of 40 lunching tourists —Pat Orvis, N.Y. Times, 11 Apr. 1976 William Dean Howells would be pleased. |
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