Note 143 — III

I cannot doubt that this form which our country people in Hampshire, as in many other parts, always employ, either retains the original pronunciation, our received one being a modern corruption; or else, as is more probable, that we have made a confusion between two originally different words, from which they have kept clear. Thus in Howell’s Vocabulary, 1659, and in Cotgrave’s French and English Dictionary both words occur: “nuncion or nuncheon, the afternoon’s repast”, (cf. Hudibras, i. 1, 346: “They took their breakfasts or their nuncheons”), and “lunchion, a big piece” i.e. of bread; for both give the old French ‘caribot’, which has this meaning, as the equivalent of ‘luncheon’. It is clear that in this sense of lump or ‘big piece’ Gay uses ‘luncheon’:

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.