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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the first meal that you eat in the day your "breakfast?"

Because wouldn't that be the time you "break" your "fast".

No, just because breakfast is a compound word doesn't mean it must exactly match the two words it is composed of. Spearmint isn't mint leaves tied to a spear, Carhop doesn't involve jumping in any way, and understand doesn't involve standing anywhere let alone under anything.

Some compound words do, however, like firetruck. It's a truck. For fire. Breakfast falls into that category.

Well it's sort of more of a watertruck really, isn't it?

It does not carry water but it does carry equipment to handle fire.

Firetrucks carry water.

Some do, others carry a large pump and hook up to a fire hydrant for the actual water supply.

So then when McDonald's introduced breakfast anytime and had ads about having breakfast for lunch and breakfast for dinner they were suggesting fasting all day until you got an egg mcmuffin for lunch or your end of day meal?

I don't disagree with the it started as first meal of the day regardless of time of day, but these days it is more likely to mean morning meal than it is first meal of the day.

There are many ideas conveyed by a single word in English.

You could refer to the concept of breakfast, the meal, and also the common food of breakfast, bacon and eggs, with the same word.

He's completely right, the origin of "breakfast" is ending your nightly fast. It's been in use since at least the 15th century, prior to that (Old English) morgenmete was used; morning meal.

The same logic happens with the Portuguese word "desjejum", which can be broken in almost the same manner, meaning "that [meal] which breaks your fast (des+jejum).

Interestingly, in french, it's the same kind of roots (déjeuner, dé- (quite like the un- prefix in english), jeuner (fast)), but the word doesn't actually point to the morning meal, but instead, it points to lunch. The word for the morning meal is "petit déjeuner", literally "small un-fast". Presumably, people were not having a morning meal a long time ago.

I always refer to the first meal of the day as breakfast, it never fails to amuse me how genuinely upset people can get over it too.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I don't eat unless I'm hungry or going to be working out later (or have just worked out, which usually means I'm hungry). So Sundays, my lazy day, I sometimes don't eat breakfast until dinner. Sometimes not at all, because I just don't get hungry (on a particularly lazy Sunday especially). So when I go out with my friends on a Saturday or Sunday night it might be my first meal of the day. They're usually shocked.

Only in English ;)

In PT-BR, our term translates to "morning coffee", and in PT-PT translates as "little lunch" (from french, petit déjeuner).

(Actually we also have a translation for breakfast - desjejum - but its not commonly used.)

Spanish also has a similar term as desjejum and breakfast: "desayuno"

I love the sound of that word. Is it the one people use like "breakfast"?

Yes. And like the french word it literally means to stop fasting.

As you mention French, interestingly, déjeuner literally means to stop fasting (dé-: prefix to stop or cancel, -jeuner : to fast).

edit: breakfast used to be called déjeuner, but it has been replaced by petit-déjeuner (little déjeuner literally) in some regions (including France). Other regions still call the first meal déjeuner.

Hence why they call it a Wedding Breakfast when you get married, because it's the first meal you have as a married couple.

Similarly, working swing shift and your "lunch" break is during a day-worker's dinnertime. Some of us call the meal "linner".

Yes from the "words have meaning" point of view, breakfast is unavoidable.

There are other points of view?

That "words have other meanings", like breakfast would be what you eat within X hours of waking up.

There are more and less literal understandings of words. Breakfast, as commonly understood, is meant as the first meal of the day, and specifically the morning meal.

Referring to your first meal, at 8pm without having slept away the day, as "breakfast" is outside most people's understanding of the word, though it is, strictly speaking, correct.

It's like the various meanings and uses of the word "decimate". The literal and historical meaning is to remove 1 out of 10 of a group, such as in combat against enemy forces or as punishment of some group or something. Today, it means removing a large percentage. "The army was decimated" today means that a large percentage (subjective) was killed or wounded.

Subjective meaning: Some might say 10% is large, others might mean 80%. And it depends on the initial size. 10% of 100 is only 10, that doesn't seem large. But 10% of 1,000,000 is 10,000, that's substantial though the percentage itself may appear small.

Taking your question seriously, yes. Two major schools of thought are "prescriptive" vs. "descriptive". This terms are usually applied to the noun "grammar" but it works for vocabulary, too. See: http://amyrey.web.unc.edu/classes/ling-101-online/tutorials/...

Descriptively, breakfast is clearly an early-morning meal eaten within an hour or two of the end of sleep. There is also, at least in America where I can speak for it, a set of associated "breakfast foods", making it reasonable to "have breakfast for dinner" and most people know what you mean. (i.e., even my 5-year-old knew precisely what that meant when I first said it, so one should carefully consider one's internet-pedant options before claiming that makes no sense :) ) Prescriptively one could make a case for "the meal that breaks your fast", though I daresay it would be a rather weak case. The term "fast" is almost dead in modern American English, though it may be making a comeback via things like Intermittent Fasting: https://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2013/08/06/a-beginners-guid... (Which, for the purposes of this post, I'm merely pointing out a word usage. Though I do it myself now, I'm not defending or advocating it here.)

I believe he's being uncharitable to the descriptive point of view when he calls the prescriptive point of view the "words have meaning" point of view.

To flip the bias there, you could call the prescriptive point of view the "words have meaning ordained by God and it doesn't matter what anyone actually says" point of view, and call the descriptive point of view the "evidence-based" point of view.

When people say "breakfast", do they mean the moment of breaking one's fast? A prescriptivist would say "yes, obviously, it's right there in the word". A descriptivist would say "probably not, because everybody understands what it means to 'skip breakfast'."

That's not true, starting at any time you can avoid breakfast for the rest of your life.

Or rather from the "words have a meaning consisting of the combined meanings of their root words, or in the case of compound words, the combined meanings of their constituent words" - summarized as the "silly" point of view.

You don't break a fast anyway, it's a metaphor. You can only break physical things. You interrupt it. Wait, that just means between + break in Latin. That doesn't even make sense - you're ending the fast, not pausing it... but wait, aren't you pausing it - because eventually you'll cease eating. Maybe all words are just convenient labels using metaphors to help us remember them. Anarchy!

edit: I thought about it a little longer, and wondered if "end" might be a better word, then realized that was a physical metaphor too. I've finally settled on a word that makes strict sense: "terminate." From now on, the appropriate word for the first meal you eat after not eating, no matter the time of day or even whether there was a period during that time when you were sleeping (hence every single meal and every single snack) will be "fastermination." And you shouldn't look at me weirdly when I say that; I'm just using English (or Latin or whatever) properly, and in the grand scheme of things, I'm more right than you are.

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