lunch

“I have a hunch,” Maury said, “we’ve beaten the lunch bunch to the punch.”

“Yes,” I said, surveying the still-deserted food court, “we’re ahead of the crunch.”

Jess nodded approvingly. “That’s good. I hate to have to use a truncheon to approach my luncheon.”

Maury looked at his watch. “Of course, the fact that it’s barely eleven would have something to do with it.”

“So we’ll call it a brunch,” Jess said.

I shrugged. “I just want something to munch.” I looked around. “Not too many options in that respect.”

“We’re surrounded by food places!” Jess protested. “Not too many options?”

“Most of what they serve does not make an audible crunch,” I said. “I am not of that school who – like some restaurant reviewers – would use munch for eating foods such as fried eggs or mashed potatoes.”

“Or soft tacos or hamburgers,” Maury added. He looked over to his left and jabbed me with his elbow. “You could get a Double Down.”

I looked down at his elbow. “What was that?”

“A dunch,” he said. “A short sharp blow, with the elbow.”

“Well,” I said, returning to the main topic, “double down is what I want in my pillow, not on my plate – and goose down, not chicken down.”

“Well, then, what sounds tastiest?”

“So far,” I said, “unch.”

“You can’t make a meal of a phonaestheme,” Jess pointed out.

“True,” I said, “but it works the jaws and, with that final affricate, makes a sort of crunch.”

“Would you really call it a phonaestheme?” Maury mused. “Do the words all have some element of sense in common?”

“They mostly seem to have an onomatopoeic origin,” I said. “Even bunch is thought to have an imitative basis.”

“Well,” said Jess, “I don’t know that I’d be as definite as that. I seem to recall that the OED gives ‘of obscure origin’ for several of them.”

“My favourite is its source for luncheon,” I said. “It says ‘related in some way to lunch.'”

“Which, in its turn,” Maury said, “may have formed on the basis of lump the same way hunch may have been based on hump and bunch may be related to bump.”

“And then there’s the other lunch,” I said, “basically obsolete now: ‘the sound made by the fall of a soft, heavy body.'”

“A lump, perhaps?” said Maury. “Does a lurch by a lump count?”

“Well,” declared Jess, “I would like a lump of something for lunch.” She looked around again. “Holy cow!”

We looked up. In the short time we had been tasting words, lines had formed at all of the food places. Maury threw his hands up as if crying “Uncle!” and audibly collapsed onto the nearest seat.

“Well,” said Jess, “that was our ‘lunch.'”

Thanks to Gabriel Cooper for suggesting the unch words.

punch

A short, punchy word, on the whole – or, rather, several identical short, punchy words. One (or two, counting noun and verb) comes from puncheon, a tool for poking holes or, by extension, stamping into (as with a die), which comes from the same Latin source as puncture. From this application of direct force came the sense with the fist. One comes from a commedia dell’arte character, Policinella, with a big paunch and a hooked nose, who became Punchinello, an English puppet character, shortened to Punch, who became best known for beating his wife, Judy, with a stick. One comes from the Sanskrit and Hindi word for “five,” as in five ingredients – in a beverage that was adapted by the English to something that rather caught on. (And began drifting semantically quickly once unmoored from the Raj – rum punch, big in the West Indies, has four ingredients classically: “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak” are the measures.) But a good glass of punch packs a punch (and may punch a hole in your stomach if you have H. pylori problems). Hole is certainly a common collocation of this word, and ticket comes in often enough with the same sense, but outside of specific uses – and even to some extent within them – the puncture sense is bested by the pugnacious force of the word. Other collocations include pulling, packing, drunk, press, card, in, out and up. Even the letters have more the rounded shape of a blunt object (fist, wife-beating stick*) than any reminiscence of an awl or similar piercing object. Only a vowel separates this word from pinch, but the broad u and the narrow i are as opposed as the two actions. This word has the opening phonaesthetics of abrupt words such as puff, punt, pug, and punish, and the closing impact of crunch, bunch and hunch and the crisper munch and lunch. But when you’re quaffing a glass, it may make you think sooner of quench.

*The story that “rule of thumb” comes from the size of a stick a man was allowed to beat his wife with is not true; that account was invented long after the phrase, which came from estimating measurements. See www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rul1.htm .