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Old 06-26-2007, 12:10 AM   #286
davem
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
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davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
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Originally Posted by Morthoron
You are again incorrect. Totally. Utterly. By your reasoning, Frodo and Bilbo would certainly use the term 'lunch' because the Bagginses (Bilbo and Frodo specifically) are indeed of the same social caste as the Brandybucks and Tooks. They are 'respectable' hobbits, and their speech pathology bears it out (there are neither colorful rustic colloquialisms, nor malaprops, nor droppin' o' the 'aitches in either Frodo or Bilbo's speech). They're family is married into both the Took and Brandybuck families (first cousins, I believe), and are most certainly part of the squirearchy of the Shire.
Nope. Bilbo & Frodo are naturally conservative in behaviour & speech patters. They are old fashioned & would tend to avoid neologisms like 'lunch'. Merry & Pippin are the very opposite - use of new words would certainly reflect Tookishness.

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Frodo and Bilbo bear all the earmarks of English Country gentlemen, and they certainly do not stoop to manual labor (which is what the Gaffer and Sam are for). The entire relationship between Frodo and 'his' Sam bears that out. Sam is the batman or valet to Frodo's Subaltern, a point which cannot be argued because Tolkien refers to it himself. By your convoluted miasma of rambling rhetoric, the term 'lunch' is then totally acceptable for the narrator of the story because Frodo and Bilbo wrote the bulk of the Book of Westmarch.
Yes, & Tolkien also states that Hobbits are based on rural Englsih folk from the time of the Diamond Jubilee, & they would have said dinner not lunch. Sorry, but you can't use one statement by Tolkien to try & support your argument & then ignore another one which totally destroys it.

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You continue to make glaring errors due mostly to your class biases.
No. Ask any English person about the use of dinner as opposed to lunch. If an English person uses 'dinner' to refer to the mid day meal rather than 'lunch' you can tell instantly what class they are, what their social background is, what TV programmes they watched as children, what newspapers they read - or at least make a very good guess. Ok, its not quite as clear cut these days as it was back in the late 19th century, but its still there - trust me.
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