Jim Reeves sang it. So did many others: “Come home, come home, it’s suppertime.”
They didn’t mean breakfast or dinner.
But, now dinner comes later than it used to. It used to come at noon. Now it comes at about the same time as telemarketers – at supper time.
I can’t blame it on the cook, or even on Daylight Saving Time. What’s at fault is sometime more insidious. We’re losing our native Ozarks culture and dialect. The “local color” in our language is being painted over with some boring, pink pastel.
When I was a boy down on the farm, we had three meals – breakfast, dinner and supper. There was never any confusing them. We never ate lunch. Folks somewhere other than the hills ate lunch. We ate dinner in the middle of the day.
The only place I ever ate “lunch” was at school, in the “lunchroom.” I don’t remember “school lunches” ever being called “school dinners,” which could be where this whole misconception started in the first place – with some Washington bureaucrat who didn’t know daylight from dark. Henceforth, we have “lunch money” and “the USDA’s “school lunch program” adding a whole new vernacular to our language when we started grade school.
I was probably a teenager before I heard supper confused with dinner, and that was on television. It was after I moved away from my farm roots and began to mingle with outsiders – city folks, even Easterners – at college and at work that I started hearing “dinner” used to mean the evening meal. Hardly anyone had “supper.”
I reckon “dinner” had a more sophisticated sound to it, especially when a fellow was asking a gal out to eat. In the traditional meaning, “dinner and a movie” would have allowed for a lot of time between the two, but asking a gal to “supper” might have connoted asking her over to eat with the family, rather than taking her out to a restaurant.
In my own experience, though, I don’t recall it posing much of a problem. I was too bashful to ask a gal the time of day, let alone time together.
However, I do remember a couple of instances when I was invited to “dinner,” that I made a point of asking exactly what time it would be. Lucky I did, too, else I’d have arrived about five hours early.
Curious about this confusion between dinner at noon and dinner at night, I checked a couple of books on the Ozarks and found that Ellen Gray Massey affirms in “Bittersweet Country” that “the big meal was at noon and was called dinner.” After the midday rest and an afternoon of work, the family “gathered again for supper.”
Guy Howard in “Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks” reinforces the notion with several references to dinner as the noon meal.
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary calls dinner “the principal meal of the day,” but goes on to identify supper as the evening meal, “especially when dinner is taken at midday.”
I don’t know that Webster clarifies the issue all that much. But, it’s not too muddy for me. I learned it right the first time.
Dinner is in the middle of the day. Supper is at the end of the day.
The truth of it is reinforced in dozens of song verses, like “Come home, come home, it’s suppertime,” and traditions like pie suppers, as well as old-time farm fixtures like the dinner bell, which was rung to call the hands in from the field.
There was even a time when city folks had it straight and went to “supper clubs” for a night on the town, and laborers carried “dinner” buckets to the job.
These days I’m as guilty as most. I say “dinner” when I oughta say “supper,” and I go to lunch in the middle of the day, rather than to dinner.
But, I’m gonna try to do better. I’m ashamed of the way I’ve forsaken my raisin’s.
Dinner deserves its rightful place in the middle of the day.
Supper’s done nothing to be shunned from the evening table.
“Lunch” is a puny word that we can do without, and “supper” is one we can’t afford to lose.
Say it a couple of times. It’s got more meat on its bones than “lunch” or “dinner,” either one, and I ain’t about to toss it.
I’m reminded, too, that the Lord took a “Last Supper,” not a “Last Dinner.”
That clinches it for me.
Copyright 2024, James E. Hamilton; email [email protected]. Read more of his works in Ozarks RFD 2010-2015, available online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from the author.
