Lunch

Lunch (pronounced luhnch)

(1) A light midday meal between breakfast and dinner; luncheon.

(2) Any light meal or snack.

(3) To eat lunch.

(4) In slang, as “out to lunch:, dim, vague, useless ineffectual.

(5) In slang as “lunchy”, old-fashioned; passé; out of style (obsolete).

(6) In slang as “eating their lunch”, outwitting an opponent.

(7) In Caribbean slang (among older folk), mid afternoon tea.

(8) In first-class and test-match cricket, the break in play between the first and second sessions.

(9) In Minnesota, USA, any small meal, especially one eaten at a social gathering.

1580:  It’s never been clear which came first: lunch or luncheon.  Origin of both is thought to lie in a dissimilated variant of nuncheon, the Middle English nonechenche (noon ling meal and drink), equivalent to none (noon) + schench (from the Old English scenc or scencan (to pour out, give drink)), cognate with the Dutch and German schenken.  Apparent unrelated, Old English had nonmete (afternoon meal, literally "noon-meat").  Nonechenche was possibly altered by the northern English dialect lunch (hunk of bread or cheese) from 1590 which may be from lump or the Spanish lonja (slice, literally “loin”).  Because dinner in the sense of the biggest or main meal of the day) could be eaten either at around noon, in the evening or at night, there was a need for a meal to fill the gap between breakfast and dinner.

A montage of a languid Lindsay Lohan lingering over lunch.

The idea of lunch as it’s now understood took a long time to evolve, to “take a lunch” in 1786 is recorded as eating a chunk of something (perhaps evolved from lump), carved sufficiently large to constitute a filling meal and as late as 1817, the US Webster’s Dictionary offered as the only definition of lunch "a large piece of food", a meaning long obsolete and in the 1820s, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) thought it either “a vulgarism or a fashionable affectation".   Nevertheless, lunch’s intrusion into the language in the nineteenth century does suggest some sort of social change was afoot, either in the type, style or timing of meals or at least the words used to describe them.  Lunch-money was attested from 1868; lunch-time from 1821; lunch hour from 1840 and the lunch-break from 1960.  The slang phrase out to lunch in the sense of “a bit vague, dim, clueless (but some way short of actually insane) was first recorded in recorded 1955, the notion of being "not there" and instead at lunch.

Receptacles in which to store one’s lunch for transport have a history.  The lunch-box is documented from 1864, the lunch-pail from 1891.  Those were descriptive nouns whereas lunch-bucket emerged in the 1990s as an adjective indicating working-class men or values, bucket presumably the best word because it was universally understood in the English-speaking world to an extent pail was not.  Lunch-bag seems never to have become a common form despite being widely used but in the 1970s, the verb brown-bag (and the related brown-bagging) referring to bringing lunch or liquor in a brown paper bag.  A long-time staple of a lunch-pail’s contents, lunch-meat (a processed form of meat-based protein produced in a size which, when sliced, was aligned with the slices of standard loaves of bread and thus convenient for making sandwiches) was first documented in 1931.  The lunch-counter (a long, elevated table or bench where customers eat standing or sitting on high stools) is an 1854 invention of US English.

The possible future of lunch: Grilled jellyfish.

The portmanteau word brunch dates from circa 1890, a British student slang merging of breakfast and lunch, according to the magazine Punch (1 August 1896).  It appeared in 1895 in the defunct Hunter's Weekly, but two years earlier, at the University of Oxford, the students had drawn what must at the time have seemed an important distinction: The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is "brunch" and, when nearer luncheon, is "blunch".  That’s a linguistic curiosity in that the brunch survived while blunch did not yet the modern understanding of a brunch appears to be something taken closer to the time of lunch than breakfast.  It may be that brunch was just the more pleasingly attractive word, blunch not so well rolling off the tongue.

Several spellings of luncheon were noted in the decades after the 1640s, the now standardised form not widespread until 1706.  Of uncertain origin, in the 1580s was used to describe something like the northern English dialectal lunch (hunk of bread or cheese), though influenced by the Spanish lonja (a slice, literally "loin"), blended with or influenced by nuncheon, from the mid-fourteenth century Middle English nonechenche, (light mid-day meal), from none (noon) + schench (drink), from the Old English scenc, from scencan (pour out).

The possible future of lunch: Fishcakes.

The etymology of all these words is tangled and there are reasons to suspect the similar forms arose independently in different place rather than as forks of anything vaguely lineal, the OED discounting the notion of lunching, which dates from the 1650s, being derived from the verb lunch because that wasn’t to be attested for another century, the OED suggesting there may be some connection (by analogy) with words like truncheon etc to simulate a French origin which is speculative but such things are not unknown in ever class-conscious England.  Whatever the origin, it does seem to have been used to describe an early afternoon meal eaten by those who take dinner at noon.

Vile

Vile (pronounced vahyl)

(1) Wretchedly bad.

(2) Highly offensive, unpleasant, or objectionable.

(3) Repulsive or disgusting, as to the senses or feelings; repellent.

(4) Morally debased, depraved, or despicable; vulgar, obscene.

(5) Foul; filthy.

(6) Poor; wretched.

(7) Of mean or low condition; Menial; lowly.

(8) Degraded; ignominious.

(9) Of little value or account; paltry

(10) Vicious, evil iniquitous.

(11) Unpleasant or bad weather.

1250–1300: From the Middle English vil, from the Anglo-French ville, from the Old French vil (shameful, dishonorable; low-born; cheap; ugly, hideous), from the Latin vīlis (cheap, worthless, base, common), possibly from the primitive Indo-European wes-li, a deverbal adjective with passive meaning (which can be bought), from the root of venus (sale).  It was cognate with the Latin vīlis, the Ancient Greek ὦνος (ônos) & ὠνέομαι (ōnéomai) (to buy), the Sanskrit वस्नयति (vasnayati) (to haggle) and वस्न (vasna) (price).  Related forms are the adjectives viler and vilest, the adverb vilely and the noun vileness (the thirteenth century vilety appears to be extinct).  Handy synonyms include repugnant, horrid, contemptible, depraved, noxious, vulgar, humiliating, vicious, disgusting, sleazy, ugly, despicable, repulsive, revolting, miserable, nasty, appalling, immoral, shocking and disgraceful.

The verb revile was from the late fourteenth century revilen (debase, degrade (a sense now obsolete)) and by the mid-fourteenth century meant "insult, taunt, vilify, assail with abusive language".  It was from the Old French reviler (consider vile, despise, scorn).  The mid-fifteenth century vilify (to lower in worth or value) was from the Late Latin vilificare (to make cheap or base; to esteem of little value) is from the Latin vilis (cheap, worthless, base, common).  The meaning "to slander, speak evil of" dates from the 1590s.

Crooked Hillary Clinton, deleting something.

Prandial

Prandial (pronounced pran-dee-uhl)

Of or relating to a meal, especially dinner (sometimes affected, jocose or facetious).

1810-1820: From the Late Latin prandialis or the Classical Latin prandium (late breakfast; lunch), perhaps from the primitive Indo-European pr̥hemós (first), from prehe- + -edere (to eat) + the Latin -ium (the suffix forming nouns), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European -yós (suffix forming adjectives from noun stems) +‎ -al (the suffix forming adjectives).  The primitive Indo-European ed- root (to eat) meant originally "to bite".  It’s never been clear why the meaning shift from the Classical Latin meaning (late breakfast; lunch) to the later (dinner) happened.  Now, prandial is used almost exclusively as (a usually jocular or affected) pre-prandial or post-prandial (often plural), a reference to before or after-dinner drinks.  The adverb is prandially.

Lindsay Lohan enjoying a pre-pradial.

The first use of the adjective postprandial (now usually as post-prandial) seems to have been by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) in 1820 to convey the meaning "happening, said, done etc; after dinner".  The first known instance of preprandial (also pre-prandial) (before dinner) is in a letter of 1822 by the poet Charles Lamb (1775–1834) to Coleridge: “Why you should refuse twenty guineas per sheet for Blackwood’s or any other magazine passes my poor comprehension. But, as Strap says, you know best.  I have no quarrel with you about præprandial avocations—so don’t imagine one.”

Rebarbative

Rebarbative (pronounced ree-bahr-buh-tiv)

(1) Causing annoyance, irritation, or aversion; repellent.

(2) Fearsome; forbidding (obsolete).

1885: From the French rébarbative, the feminine form of the fourteenth century rébarbatif (disagreeable; repellent; unattractive), from the Middle French rébarber (to oppose; to stand up to;to be unattractive) from the Old French rebarber (to repel (an enemy), to withstand (him) face to face).  The construct was ré- + barbe (beard) + -atif (-ative).  The re- prefix is from the Middle English re-, from the circa 1200 Old French re-, from the Latin re- & red- (back; anew; again; against), from the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (again), a metathetic alteration of wert- (to turn).  It displaced the native English ed- & eft-.  A hyphen is not normally included in words formed using this prefix, except when the absence of a hyphen would (1) make the meaning unclear, (2) when the word with which the prefix is combined begins with a capital letter, (3) when the word with which the is combined with begins with another “re”, (4) when the word with which the prefix is combined with begins with “e”, (5) when the word formed is identical in form to another word in which re- does not have any of the senses listed above.  As late as the early twentieth century, the dieresis was sometimes used instead of a hyphen (eg reemerge) but this is now rare except when demanded for historic authenticity or if there’s an attempt deliberately to affect the archaic.  Re- may (and has) been applied to almost any verb and previously irregular constructions appear regularly in informal use; the exception is all forms of “be” and the modal verbs (can, should etc).  Although it seems certain the origin of the Latin re- is the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (which has a parallel in Umbrian re-), beyond that it’s uncertain and while it seems always to have conveyed the general sense of "back" or "backwards", there were instances where the precise was unclear and the prolific productivity in Classical Latin tended make things obscure.  Barbe was from the Latin barba (beard), literally “to stand beard to beard against”   The –atif suffix was used in Latin to indicate “of, related to, or associated with the thing specified”.

The generally accepted theory for the origin of the word is the itchy, irritating quality of a beard.  The word is applied now to anyone really annoying.

Crooked Hillary Clinton.

Mullet

Mullet (pronounced muhl-it)

(1) Any of various teleost food marine or freshwater, usually gray fishes of the family Mugilidae (grey mullet (order Mugiliformes)) or Nullidae (red mullet (order Syngnathiformes)), having a nearly cylindrical body; a goatfish; a sucker, especially of the genus Moxostoma (the redhorses).

(2) A hairstyle in which the hair is short in the front and at the sides of the head, and longer in the back; called also the “hockey player haircut" and the "soccer rocker"; the most extreme form is called the skullet, replacing the earlier hockey hair.

(3) In heraldry, a star-like charge having five or six points unless a greater number is specified, used especially as the cadency mark of a third son; known also as American star & Scottish star.  The alternative spelling is molet.

(4) In slang (apparently always in the plural), a reference to one’s children (two or more).

(5) In slang, a person who mindlessly follows a fad, trend or leader; a generally dim-witted person.

(6) In dress design, a design based on the hairstyle, built around the concept of things being longer at the back, tapering progressively shorter towards the sides and the front.  The name is modern, variations of the style go back centuries.

1350-1400: The use in heraldry is from the Middle English molet(te), from the Old French molete (rowel of a spur), the construct being mole (millstone (the French meule) + -ette (the diminutive suffix).  The reference to the fish species dates from 1400–50, from the late Middle English molet, mulet & melet, from the Old French mulet (red mullet), from the Medieval Latin muletus, from the Latin muletus & moletus from mullus (red mullet) from the Ancient Greek μύλλος (múllos & mýllos) (a Pontic of fish), which may be related to melos (black) but the link is speculative.

The use to describe the hair-style dates from 1994, thought to be a shortening of the slang mullethead (blockhead, fool, idiot (mull meaning “to stupefy”)), popularized and possibly coined by US pop-music group the Beastie Boys in their song “Mullet Head”.  Mullet-head also was a name of a large, flat-headed North American freshwater fish (1866) which gained a reputation for stupidity (ie, was easily caught).  As a surname, Mullet is attested in both France and England from the late thirteenth century, the French form thought related to the Old French mul (mule), the English from the Middle English molet, melet & mulet (mullet) a metonymic occupational name for a fisherman or seller of these fish although some sources do suggest a link to a nickname derived from mule.

The noun plural is mullet if applied collectively to two or more species of the fish and mullets for other purposes (such as two or more fish of the same species or the curious use as a (class-associated) slang term parents use to refer to their children if there are two or more although use in the singular isn’t recorded; apparently they can have two (or more) mullets but not one mullet.

The mullet hairstyle goes back a long way.  The Great Sphinx of Giza is thought to be some four and a half thousand years old but evidence men and women hair with hair cut short at the front and sides, long at the back, exists from thousands of year earlier.  It’s assumed by historians that the cut would variously have been adopted for functional reasons (warmth for the neck and freedom for obstruction of the eyes & face) and as a preferred style.  There are many findings in the archaeological record and, over many centuries, references to the hair style being a feature of many cultures.  In the West, the acceptability of longer cuts for men was one of the social changes of the 1960s and the mullet was one style to again arise; from there it’s never gone away although, as the mullet came to be treated as a class-identifier, use did become more nuanced, some claiming to wear one ironically.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

Opinion remains mixed but there are mullet competitions with prizes although, it must take an expert to work out the difference between the “best” mullet and the “worst”.  The competitions seem popular and are widely publicized, although the imagery can be disturbing for those with delicate sensibilities not often exposed to certain sub-cultures.  Such folk are perhaps more familiar with the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge but there was a time when he wore a mullet although the portraits which survive suggest his might not have been sufficiently ambitious to win any modern contests.

An emo with variegated tellum in black, purple & copper.

Associated initially with that most reliable of trend-setters, the emo, the tellum (mullet spelled backwards), more helpfully described as the “reverse mullet” is, exactly as suspected, long in front and short at the back.  Definitely a thing exclusively of style because it discards the functionally which presumably was the original rationale for the mullet, emos often combine the look with one or more lurid colors, the more patient sometimes adopting a spiky look which can be enlivened with a different color for each spike.  That’s said to be quite high-maintenance.

Martina Navratilova (b 1956).

On a tennis court, a mullet is functional.  No more monolithic than any others, it’s probably absurd to think of any of the component part of the LGBTQQIAAOP as being an identifiable culture but there appears to have been a small lesbian sub-set in the 1980s which adopted the mullet although motives were apparently mixed, varying from (1) chauvinistic assertiveness of the lesbionic, (2) blatant advertising for a mate to (3) just another haircut.

It also featured in a recent, celebrated case of gender-fluidity, Bruce Jenner (b 1949) sporting a mullet shortly before beginning his transition to Caitlyn Jenner.  However, the mullet may be unrelated to the change, the record indicating his long-time devotion to the cut and, since becoming Caitlyn, it seems to have been retired for styles more overtly feminine.

Charles II (1630–1685; King of Scotland 1649-1651, King of Scotland, England and Ireland 1660-1685) in his coronation robes (circa 1661), oil on canvas by John Michael Wright (1617–1694).

Charles II an early adopter of the mullet dress, chose the style for his seventeenth century coronation robes.

Lindsay Lohan, also with much admired legs, followed the Stuart example.

The mullet dress.  Miranda Kerr in pink demonstrates.

Red Mullet.

Grey Mullet.

Privity

Privity (pronounced priv-i-tee)

(1) Private or secret knowledge.

(2) Participation in the knowledge of something private or secret, especially as implying concurrence or consent.

(3) An obsolete synonym for privacy or secrecy.

(4) In medieval theology, a divine mystery; something known only to God, or revealed only in the Holy Scriptures (obsolete).

(5) The genitals (archaic, and only in the plural).

(6) In law, a relationship between parties seen as being a result of their mutual interest or participation in a given transaction, usually in contract.

1175–1225: From the Anglo-Norman priveté, privitee and the Middle English privete & privite from the Old French priveté & privité & priveté (privé + -té) (privacy; a secret, private matter) from prive (private) from the Late Latin privus (set apart, belonging to oneself).  Ultimate source was the Classical Latin privātus (perfect passive participle of prīvō (I bereave, deprive; I free, release).  The word was used from the 1520s as a technical term in the laws regulating feudal land tenure and by the 1550s had come to mean "participation in the knowledge of something secret.  The use to describe the genitals (private parts) as the privities is attested from the late fourteen century and didn’t fade from use until the nineteenth although it had log become a regional, dialectical form.

Privity of Contract and the intervention of tort

Although now much modified by both statute and case law, the doctrine of privity of contract held that a contract cannot confer rights or impose obligations upon any person not a party to the contract.  The decision in the appeal case of Tweddle v Atkinson (EWHC J57 (QB), (1861) 1 B&S 393) is the classic expression of the doctrine and one which entrenched it in English law.  The father of a bride promised the father of the groom he would pay the groom (the plaintiff) a sum of money upon the marriage.  The bride’s father died before the payment could be made and the executor of his estate refused to honor the promise.  The plaintiff sued for the money but the court held, notwithstanding the contract being made exclusively for his benefit, the action failed because he was not a contracting party; there was no privity of contract between the parties.  The court didn’t comment on whether the groom's father could successfully have sued the estate, nor was this ever tested.  Legal devices now exist to circumvent the doctrines (such as the use of negotiable instruments), the greatest being the various laws dealing with the rights of third parties in contracts, as a general principle, allow a beneficiary or an identified third party to enforce terms to its benefit in a contract made by others.

Contracts are most often agreements between parties for the sale of goods or services but horizontal privity exists when a benefit from a contract is extended to a third party. Vertical privity is where one of the parties to a contract enters another contract with a third party, wholly independent of the original.  By the twentieth century, the implications of the doctrine of privity of contract were increasingly creating anomalies in societies in which packaged consumer goods, passing sometimes through ownership by several corporations before reaching the final buyer, were becoming a large part of an economy.  The classic example was a manufacturer selling goods to a wholesaler which on-sells to the retailer from which the consumer ultimately purchases the goods.  There being no privity of contract between the manufacturer and the consumer, in the event of the consumer suffering damages caused by defective goods, the consumer couldn’t sue the manufacturer.  For this reason, in the twentieth century, tort law developed in the fields of both negligence and product liability all based on the doctrine of the duty of care owed by manufacturers of goods both throughout the supply chain and to the final consumer.

Embellish

Embellish (pronounced m-bell-lysh)

(1) To decorate, garnish, bedeck or embroider an object.

(2) To beautify by ornamentation; to adorn.

(3) To enhance a statement or narrative with fictitious additions.

1300–1350: From the Middle English embelisshen from the Anglo-French, from the Middle French embeliss- (stem of embelir), the construct being em- (The form taken by en- before the labial consonants “b” & “p”, as it assimilates place of articulation).  The en- prefix was from the Middle English en- & in-.  In the Old French it existed as en- & an-, from the Latin in- (in, into); it was also from an alteration of in-, from the Middle English in-, from the Old English in- (in, into), from the Proto-Germanic in (in).  Both the Latin and Germanic forms are from the primitive Indo-European en (in, into) and the frequency of use in the Old French is because of the confluence with the Frankish an- intensive prefix, related to the Old English on-.) + bel-, from the Latin bellus (pretty) + -ish.  The –ish suffix was from the Middle English –ish & -isch, from the Old English –isċ, from the Proto-West Germanic -isk, from the Proto-Germanic –iskaz, from the primitive Indo-European -iskos.  It was cognate with the Dutch -s; the German -isch (from which Dutch gained -isch), the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish -isk & -sk, the Lithuanian –iškas, the Russian -ский (-skij) and the Ancient Greek diminutive suffix -ίσκος (-ískos); a doublet of -esque and -ski.  There exists a welter of synonyms and companion phrases such as decorate, grace, prettify, bedeck, dress up, exaggerate, gild, overstate, festoon, embroider, adorn, spiff up, trim, magnify, deck, color, enrich, elaborate, ornament, beautify, enhance, array & garnish.  Embellish is a verb, embellishing is a noun & verb, embellished is a verb & adjective and embellisher & embellishment are nouns; the noun plural is embellishments.

The meaning "dress up (a narration) with fictitious matter" was first noted in the mid-fifteenth century and was an acknowledgement of a long (if sometimes hardly noble) literary tradition.  It was exemplified by the publication in 1785 by German author Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736-1794) of Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, a collection of extraordinary stories, based (loosely) on the tales told by the real-life Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720-1797).  The real baron was prone to quite some exaggeration in the tales of his travels but never went as far as Herr Raspe had his fictional baron flying to the moon.  The technique of enhancing a statement or narrative with fictitious additions (ie lies) was in the twentieth century perfected by Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare (b 1940) and crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947).

Lindsay Lohan in bikini embellished with faux (synthetic) fur, photo-shoot for the fifth anniversary of ODDA magazine, April 2017.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia (pronounced par-ei-do-lia)

In psychiatry and psychology, the perception of a recognizable image or meaningful pattern where none exists or is intended.

1994: From Ancient Greek παρα ((para (alongside, concurrent)) + εἴδωλον ((eídōlon (image, phantom)).  Word was invented by UFO debunker Steven Goldstein in 22 June 1994 edition of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, a publication devoted to rational, evidence-based explanations of the para-normal, magic, UFOs, conspiracies and the many crackpot notions spread by new-agers, spiritualists and other nutjobs.

Pareidolia is a form of apophenia where the mind will attempt to find connections in random events, thoughts or patterns where none actually exist. Pareidolia concentrates the visual and audio aspects of the brain in constructing a perception from a vague stimulus.  Pre-dating the actual word, in some circles in both psychology and psychiatry, it was for some decades popular to attempt to induce a form of pareidolia in a patient to be able to assess them better, most famously with the Rorschach Ink Blots.

Technically, there are two forms of pareidolia, the first, the mechanistic, where man-made objects, by mere coincidence have a resemblance to something else.  The second, the matrixed, is where natural phenomenon such as rock formations, clouds or the surfaces of planets include shapes which can be interpreted as something human, animal or supernatural and instead of being regarded as coincidental and amusing, are treated as having some inherent meaning or being evidence of some theory otherwise unsupported by any evidence.

The phenomenon of pareidolia manifests with such frequency as the identification of the human face in various structures that, given the wealth of behavioral evidence of diminished orientation towards faces as well as the presence of face perception impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), interest was taken in the possibility of a relationship between the two.  Not something in which observational studies offered obvious potential, even the of design of experiments was challenging and the legacy of ASD research seemed not a guide, the underlying mechanisms of the deficits in ASD, although habitually described as “unclear” were better called “unknown”.  In ASD research, face-like object stimuli which had been shown to evoke pareidolia in TD (typically developing according defined criteria in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; 2013) individuals were used to test the effect of a global face-like configuration on orientation and perceptual processes in young children with ASD and age-matched TD controls.  That had demonstrated TD children were more likely to look first towards upright face-like objects than children with ASD, suggesting a global face-like configuration elicit a stronger orientation bias in TD children as compared to children with ASD.

However, once focused on the stimuli, both groups spent more time exploring the upright face-like object, suggesting both perceived it as a face.  The conclusion was the result was in agreement with earlier work in the field of abnormal social orienting in ASD.  Whether variations on the approaches in ASD research would be useful in the study of pareidoila was of interest because face detection is an automatic, rapid and subconscious process, considered as a core component of the social perceptual system subtending social behaviors.  That faces can (as the illusory detection called pareidolia) be perceived in non-face stimuli, such as toast, clouds or landscapes by some while many on the ASD suffer difficulties in the perception of the real thing, did at least hint at the possibility of a link or even perhaps the need to revise the parameters of ASD.

Detecting faces in non-face stimuli may have a strong adaptive value given that from an evolutionary point of view, the cost of erroneously detecting a face in non-face stimuli might be less than failing to detect another’s face in the environment.  Pareidolia may thus be just another spectrum condition in that the perception of pareidolic faces or other shapes in a variety of surfaces or spaces may vary little between people, the difference being more the individual’s reaction and the reporting of the event(s).