“When hungry thou stood’st staring like an oaf,
I sliced the luncheon from the barley loaf”;
and Miss Baker in her Northamptonshire Glossary explains ‘lunch’ as “a large lump of bread, or other edible; ‘He helped himself to a good lunch of cake’”. We may note further that this ‘nuntion’ may possibly put us on the right track for arriving at the etymology of the word. Richardson has called attention to the fact that it is spelt “noon-shun” in Browne’s Pastorals, which must at least suggest as possible and plausible that the ‘nuntion’ was originally applied to the labourer’s slight meal, to which he withdrew for the shunning of the heat of the middle noon: especially when in Lancashire we find a word of similar formation, ‘noon-scape’, and in Norfolk ‘noon-miss’, for the time when labourers rest after dinner. [It really stands for the older English none-schenche, i.e. ‘noon-skink’ or noon-drink (see Skeat, Etym. Dict., s.v.), correlative to ‘noon-meat’ or ‘nam-met’.] It is at any rate certain that the dignity to which ‘lunch’ or ‘luncheon’ has now arrived, as when we read in the newspapers of a “magnificent luncheon”, is altogether modern; the word belonged a century ago to rustic life, and in literature had not travelled beyond the “hobnailed pastorals” which professed to describe that life.
[144] See it so written, Holland’s Pliny, vol. ii. p. 428, and often.
[145] As a proof of the excellent service which an accurate acquaintance with provincial usages may render in the investigation of the innumerable perplexing phenomena of the English language, I would refer to the admirable article On English Pronouns Personal in Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. i. p. 277.
[146] [We now have the good fortune to possess a complete collection of this valuable class of words in the splendid “English Dialect Dictionary”, edited by Professor Joseph Wright of Oxford, which is an essential supplement to all existing dictionaries of our language.]
[147] This last very curious usage, which served as a kind of stepping-stone to ‘its’, and of which another example occurs in the Geneva Version (Acts xii. 10), and three or four in Shakespeare, has been abundantly illustrated by those who have lately written on the early history of the word ‘its’; thus see Craik, On the English of Shakespeare, p. 91; Marsh, Manual of the English Language (Eng. Edit.), p. 278; Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. 1. p. 280; and my book On the Authorized Version of the New Testament, p. 59.
[148] Thus Fuller (Pisgah Sight of Palestine, vol. ii. p. 190): “Sure I am this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented by the prophet, was fairer, finer, slicker, smoother, more exact, than any fabric the earth afforded”.
[149] [In the United States ‘plunder’ is used for personal effects, baggage and luggage (Webster). This is not noticed in the E.D.D.]
[150] [But we have acquired, in some quarters, the abomination ‘an invite’.]
[151] How many words modern French has lost which are most vigorous and admirable, the absence of which can only now be supplied by a circumlocution or by some less excellent word—‘Oseur’, ‘affranchisseur’ (Amyot), ‘mépriseur’, ‘murmurateur’, ‘blandisseur’ (Bossuet), ‘abuseur’ (Rabelais), ‘désabusement’, ‘rancœur’, are all obsolete at the present. So ‘désaimer’, to cease to love (‘disamare’ in Italian), ‘guirlander’, ‘stériliser’, ‘blandissant’, ‘ordonnément’ (Montaigne), with innumerable others.