Want to Switch Lunch and Dinner?

Have you ever considered skipping a meal? Perhaps you have - for health reasons or otherwise. How about switching meals? Is it even possible to do so?

As far as I was concerned, there were three main meals in the day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Breakfast came as the first meal in the morning - and the name is also logical as you break your nightly fast (= a time period spent without consuming food) with it. Lunch was what we had around midday and it could be a light meal on a school day or a better deal on a holiday. Dinner was the evening meal taken at home and it usually was a family affair. It was as simple as that.

Things don't seem to be quite so clear-cut all over the English-speaking world though. Some communities - for example people in Northern England or in the American South - refer to their midday meal as dinner and what they have in the evening is called supper. Others have lunch at midday and dinner in the evening, like we do, but there's an additional late-evening light meal called supper.

One explanation is that dinner is supposed to be the main meal of the day. So if you have your largest meal in the daytime, you call it dinner. This was the case with working-class people who needed a copious meal during the day to give them the energy they needed for the hard physical work they did. The breakfast-lunch-dinner sequence is thought to be a middle-class tradition and for those people the midday meal was a lighter one, with the main meal coming in the evening. Upper classes are said to have used the term 'supper' rather than 'dinner' for the main evening meal, reserving 'dinner' for more formal occasions, though for a lot of others supper was a light snack that followed dinner, which was taken late in the evening.

On top of all that, the English tend to include 'morning tea' and 'evening tea' also in their daily list of meals because teatime brings not only tea but also snacks with it. So the daily line-up for some would be breakfast-morning tea-lunch-evening tea-dinner-supper. The only thing is, with all that food consumed, they'd better watch their cholesterol levels!

Image credit: Lee Brimelow

Two Languages, Two Minds?

We all have a mother tongue. And we have our native culture, which is often at least partially associated with that language. But what happens when people learn a second language that comes from a different cultural background? Do they learn just the language? Or can't they avoid getting a certain dose of the culture associated with it too?

Studies have discovered that bilingual people tend to partially change their personalities based on which language they're speaking at a given time. Those tested have been Hispanic Americans and they've shown the general pattern of being more assertive and independent while speaking English than when they speak their native Spanish.

This must be due to the more individualistic characteristics inherent in the US culture, which is associated with the English they've learned. It would be interesting to consider how people elsewhere react to the different cultural norms connected with the second languages they're learning. Do Turkish immigrants in Germany also display traits peculiar to the Germans when they make use of the adopted tongue? That may well be possible since effectively learning a new language generally involves studying - and in the process being also influenced by - the culture of its native speakers. Though you may not set out to be subjected to this force as you begin to pick up the language, there's no way a language can be mastered without a deep understanding of the thinking and behavioural patterns of the setting where it is mainly spoken.

The masses learning English in countries where the Anglo-Saxon ways are practically abhorred, like for example the Arab lands, or where Western values are considered decadent, like China (at least until a few years ago), must have a particularly hard job; they too need to learn the by-now international language while at the same time trying to keep its cultural influence at bay. One must wonder whether this is quite possible. After all, there are a lot of positive aspects of the prominent English-speaking milieu that would appeal to an intelligent mind, like punctuality or accountability, despite there also being negative nuances like the rampant materialism.

Then of course we find places like India, where English, though initially introduced by the despised British colonial forces, has meanwhile become as good as a local vernacular. In a land where hundreds of regional dialects and more than twenty official languages are used, English has blended seamlessly into the local setting, leaving behind its foreignness almost entirely. It is in such spots that one would probably expect to find the least that has to do with the mindset of the original speakers. Nevertheless, some vestiges of it can be found with the English speakers there as well, to be seen more distinctly in the urban environment. And today's Indian urbanites are being influenced even more by American culture, which has come to be almost inseparably associated with the English language worldwide in our age.

(Image credit: daveynin)