Posted by MarkD on September 19, 2017 at 00:29:17 user MarkD.
In Reply to: Re: Class and language in the books posted by Magnus Smith on September 18, 2017 at 22:58:44:
That's a very useful bit of work Magnus.
I'd like to put "lunch" in the search engine to see how often it is used and by whom, and referring to a native or explorer meal. It would be even more instructive to do this with Ransome works not from the 12, to observe his own usage.
It might sound like I'm a bit obsessive on this point, but it is probably the one thing that jars every time I read the books and I'm curious whether it was deliberate or just unconscious usage by the author. As Andy noted, the usage of “dinner” for the midday meal would probably have been commonplace for Cumbria and Leeds, and the North generally but not for the South or in RP which I'd guess (possibly erroneously) most of the children would have tended towards.
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