Elena Sgarbo (X) 
Italian to English
+ ...
| Aquí va el artículo sobre etimología, desayuno y almuerzo -en inglés, con el permiso de Q&H :-)) | Feb 4, 2005 |
Have you ever encountered the expression “jejune diet” -and thought it might refer to special meals for a person awaiting jejunal surgery (i.e., surgery of the small bowel)?. Or... what else could it mean?
The adjective jejune is a rather old and uncommon word, but it provides an interesting example of semantic evolution. The newest sense of jejune found in dictionaries is that of “immature” “puerile”, “childish” and “na... See more Have you ever encountered the expression “jejune diet” -and thought it might refer to special meals for a person awaiting jejunal surgery (i.e., surgery of the small bowel)?. Or... what else could it mean?
The adjective jejune is a rather old and uncommon word, but it provides an interesting example of semantic evolution. The newest sense of jejune found in dictionaries is that of “immature” “puerile”, “childish” and “naive”. “Surprised by their jejune responses to our problems” is the pertinent example of usage offered by The American Heritage® Dictionary.
A previous –yet still current- sense of jejune is “dull, flat, insipid, bald, dry, uninteresting.” This meaning, in turn, was an expansion of its earlier sense of “unsatisfying”, “meager”, or -when referred to land-, “barren”.
The earliest recorded meaning of jejune, however, was “fasting.” That sense derived from the Latin noun jejunus, which meant both “empty stomach” and “fasting”. Centuries later, we are seeing the word jejune used as a descriptor of feeding habits. In the expression “a jejune diet,” (found in texts related to malnutrition or eating disorders), jejune means “lacking in nutrition or without proper nourishment.”
But while nowadays jejune does not allude to the jejunum (i.e., small intestine), jejune did stem from the word jejunus, and jejunus apparently was also the parent term to the noun jejunum. Around the time the term jejunum was coined, the small intestine must have been either found empty at autopsies or believed to be void at death –hence its assigned name, synonymous with “empty”.
Later on, an interesting semantic spin came about. The word jejunus and the negative prefix dis- came together to create the verb disjejunare or disjunare. Disjunare referred to having a meal to break one’s fast, or breakfast. Breakfast in Spanish is desayuno and in French, petit déjeuner (or just déjeuner in Québec). Déjeuner for most of the French-speaking world is the mid-day meal or lunch. From déjeuner evolved (perhaps by being quickly pronounced!) the word di(s)ner, and from it, dîner, used nowadays in French to mean dinner.
So dinner etymologically means breakfast, and both terms are ironically related to jejunum - i.e., the GI portion assumed to be empty. Isn’t that a language oddity?
© Elena Sgarbossa, What do the small bowel, breakfast, dinner, and being jejune all have in common? Caduceus Summer 2004:29.
[Edited at 2005-03-04 17:48] ▲ Collapse
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