[davem]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

No, actually your statement is the antithesis of what I said, but that's okay, because the whole matter seems to disturb you far more than it does me.

I don't see how it is 'antithetical' when I was merely making the point that nuncheon, or even luncheon was preferable to the modern (English) Middle class term 'lunch'. It doesn't disturb me at all, to be honest. I was merely seeking to clarify my position.

Yes, I am sure you are the salt of the earth and wave a red flag on May Day, but since Tolkien was not from Yorkshire, it seems evident the word 'lunch' did not manifest such a malevolent reaction in him as from you Northern Brits. In the U.S., 'dinner' has a much more formal connotation than 'lunch' (and in most cases dinner is interchangeable with 'supper'); but again, 'lunch' is used casually in several instances in the books and does not seem to have any profound or aristocratic intent other than a midday meal. *shrugs*

Actually, I was not making a political but a social comment - that, being a member of the English working class I am able to comment on word usage among the English working class. Of course, Tolkien was not from Yorkshire (sad though that be for us tykes to admit, & probably a source of trauma to JRRT himself - you'd have to be English to realise how high this county is held in national esteem). He did, however, provide the Foreword to Haigh's 'A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District'. As Janet Brennan Croft comments:

In 1928, J.R.R. Tolkien published a six-page Foreword to A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, written by Walter Edward Haigh, a long-time resident of that area. This dialect was of great interest to Tolkien as a philologist, since it comes from an area where the speech of the North and of the western Midlands overlap, and bears the linguistic marks of invasions from the Scandinavian countries, the fourteenth-century revival of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the Norman conquest. Tolkien is full of praise for the wide range of the glossary, its inclusion of both rare and common words, and the "excellence, humour, and idiomatic raciness of its illustrative quotations". He surely must have nodded in agreement with Haigh's own unequivocal statement that a local dialect "is as worthy of our care and pride as are our ancient buildings, and more than as intimately useful," and his encouragement of bilingualism in standard English and one's ancestral dialect. Huddersfield, located in West Yorkshire, is a fairly young town born during the Industrial Revolution out of a cluster of older, smaller villages. In 1890, its population was over 90,000, and it was considered one of the wealthier cities in the country, being a center for the engineering, brewing, cotton, and wool industries. Tolkien considers the dialect preserved in this glossary to be rather "conservative," retaining elements long abandoned in other regions, because of its isolation "out of the main way of such traffic as there was" before this time.

Yes, 'lunch' (as I've stated about 4 or 5 times in this debate, is used in the books, mostly by the narrator, & occasionally by upper middle class characters. Upper middle class characters among Hobbits are the exception rather than the rule, The Shire having a social organisation the nearest equivalent of which would have been probably medieval Iceland (rather than England, due to the 'anarchic' political regime favoured by Tolkien). The way 'lunch'/'dinner' is used in America is both irrelevant to the way it is used in England (specificallly the English midlands) & therefore how it would be used by Hobbits, & conversely, of supreme importance - if a sequel is to be written by an American (& before anyone accuses me of bias I'd say the same about a sequel written by a middle class english writer.

Now, to repeat myself again, it was a generalisation, made in a rush. I'll try not to do it again. It was also, as I've shown, generally correct, from a linguistic point of view. What I will concede though, is that only middle class Hobbits would (or should) use the word 'lunch', that being a contraction of luncheon, only recorded from 1829, according to the On-line Etymology Dictionary - which is the only resource I can be bothered to consult at the moment.

Well, let's see...we went from Elves (and Elvish horses) snorting to the dramatic interpretations of Lunch(eon). I don't see how one is more relevant than the other, and I do believe that you started the whole digression. .

I did do that, for which I'm heartily sorry. I even acknowledged it was a digression, & basicallly irrelevant to the main topic. I didn't mention the Elvish horses snorting, merely pointing out that Elves don't snort. The differences between Elves & their horses would probably justify a whole thread in itself, & I will not risk taking this thread any further off topic by starting a list here.