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Thursday, 7 May 2020

At the Verticality Café...

IMG_5064

... it's time for the late-morning snack, third breakfast, or early lunch, if you will. Never brunch, not unless you're a breakfast skipper. Breakfast skipper — that sounds like another name for Cap'n Crunch. The term "brunch" goes back to 1895, according to the OED, which finds it first here:
1895 Independent 22 Aug. 2/1 Breakfast is ‘brekker’ in the Oxford tongue; when a man makes lunch his first meal of the day it becomes ‘brunch’: and a tea-dinner at the Union Club is a ‘smug’.
A smug, eh? That never made it into the OED as a definition of "smug," but I think a tea-dinner at the Union Club sounds really nice. You'll have to wait a few hours for that, and you'll have to come up with your own notion of the "Union Club" — which was a "gentleman's club" in London from 1800 to 1949.