Okay guys, I've had this conversation with JP I know 40 times, and I'm in the midst of having it with Jake so I figured I'd see what y'all have to say.
What do you call the midday meal, lunch or dinner?
What do you call the meal you eat in the evening, dinner or supper?
Growing up, supper was always a special occasion type of meal, like The Last Supper. Lunch was midday and Dinner was in the evening. We didn't have many suppers.
Here its interchangable and mostly depends on where your family is originally from, because a lot of southern Indiana are transplanted Southerners. With that being the case with my family, the midday meal is dinner and the evening meal is supper
lunch is a midday meal, Dinner and supper are evening/final means of the day. In England, Dinner is an evening meal. Dinner is certainly not a midday meal.
It is definately Breakfast -Lunch-Dinner here in the NW.
As others have said it is as much regional, but even more so I think it is generational. The older generations from the south that I know call the mid-day meal Dinner and the evening meal Supper. I believe they come from a generation where the mid-day meal was much more formal than it probably is today.
Ropers is dead on. When I was little my grandparents watched me while my mom worked, so when we ate at 11, it was dinner. I don't believe the mid-day meal was more formal back then Ropers, but there was more to it because you'd come in from the fields for like an hour to rest and eat a big meal to get you through the rest of the day's work on the farm
I think we may be thinking different definitions when I referred to the mid-day meal being more "formal" in the past. I wasn't really meaning, "black tie" formal but more of a big production/event everyone get together and sit down formal, whereas today, lunch is something many people eat on the run, whenever they can get to it.
Another food related regional dialect oddity to me is how Coca Cola/Pepsi/Dr Pepper/carbonated beverages in general are referred to. In Texas we call them soft drinks (I guess as opposed to hard drinks). In certain other regions I think they're referred to as sodas, soda pops, and even "pop". I've always teased my mom, who's from Colorado, for calling it pop, and I got a kick out of seeing an isle in a Denver grocery store actually labeled as "Pops".
