http://s6/middle/5b3567b4g9408f2f98f45&690Dinner讲开去" TITLE="有关英国的早餐午餐和晚餐，从Dog's Dinner讲开去" />

原文地址：http://www.englishonline.org.cn/zh-hans/vocabulary-grammar/johnny-grammar/blog/dogs-dinner

A dog’s dinner is a mess or a disaster:
A Dog’s dinner 的意思就是一团糟或者灾难一场。
When the plumber came round to fix the bathroom sink he made a right dog’s dinner of the job. Now there’s water leaking out everywhere!

当那个堵漏工人来修理浴室漏水的问题，他把工作弄的一团糟，现在整个房子都在漏水了。

For many people dinner is an evening meal but in some parts of the world it is a midday one. Traditionally in the north of England the last meal of the day would be tea; also called high tea. This wouldn’t just be a cup of tea but a slap up feed with cooked dishes, eaten at around six o’clock. When northerners talked about dinner they would mean what people in the south would call lunch. For them lunch was seen as a rather prissy middle class term. In fact dinner, as a midday meal, is even more widespread when we consider “school dinners”, which are the midday meal, school kids have to endure; largely inedible, institutional food!

对很多人来说，dinner晚餐都是在傍晚解决的，也就说是一天的最后一餐了。但是对地球的很多地方而言，它可能只是一天中间的一餐。在英格兰北部传统意义上来讲，一天的最后一餐是茶点，或者说下午茶。这不仅仅只是一杯茶那么简单而是一餐高档讲究的食物，在下午六点左右进食。当北方人在讲dinner的时候其实就是南方人说的lunch。对他们来说午餐就像草草了事的中产阶级的一餐一样。事实上，dinner作为在午餐的说法就“校园dinner”更合理而且广为流传，众所周知，那时候孩子们必须强咽下长得一样非常难吃的食物！

Lunch, also known as luncheon, has given us one common idiomatic phrase; “out to lunch” meaning crazy or not in touch with reality:

Lunch午餐，又延伸出午宴、午餐会，还演变成常见的惯用短语—out to lunch，意思是不切实际，疯狂的。
请看例句
I can’t seem to communicate with our new neighbour, she seems totally out to lunch. Just yesterday she was explaining some wacky conspiracy 古怪的阴谋theory about aliens controlling our weather systems.
 
Breakfast is supposed to be the most important meal of the day. After all, it is when we break the fast we have been undergoing all through the night. The traditional English breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausage, beans, fried bread, toast and marmalade, washed down with gallons of tea, is fast becoming a thing of the past. More and more people go for a continental breakfast of orange juice, a croissant and a cup of coffee. This isn’t necessarily a good thing as nutrition experts claim a hearty breakfast leads to a productive day. However with our busy, stressful lives who has time to do all that cooking? All I can manage is to grab a bowl of cornflakes before heading off to work!

Breakfast早餐应当是一天中最重要的一餐。说到底，它是我们“break 打破”我们绝了一晚的“fast 绝食”的一餐。传统的英式早餐是培根、鸡蛋、香肠、豆、烤面包、土司、果酱、大量的茶，但是，这些传统都已如过眼云烟。越来越多的人选择欧洲早餐，就是橙汁、羊角面包加一杯咖啡。从营养学家的角度来看，这不是好事，因为一顿丰盛的早餐能带来精力充沛的一天。但是在现代这种繁忙大压力的生活下，谁有时间去煮那些东西，人们能做到的不过是在充满上班之前囫囵吞下一碗玉米片。

With only a light breakfast many people get peckish around eleven o’clock. They may indulge in a snack and drink called “elevenses” or even have an early lunch. This meal, which could also be seen as a late breakfast, has been dubbed brunch. It is an example one of those combined words, like smog or motel, which are the amalgamation of two existing words. These have been called portmanteau words because they pack two meanings into one word.

一餐简单的早餐会让很多人在十一点的时候就饥肠辘辘。于是培养出来一种吃零食和饮料的习惯叫“elevenses”或者早早地去吃午餐，这一餐有时候也被说成是晚早餐late breakfast，亦或者说早午餐brunch。这是一个合成词，就跟smog 加 motel 一样。

Another meal we have failed to mention is supper, which is a light evening meal. If your main meal had been dinner at midday then supper would a simpler, less formal affair before going to bed.

我们容易忽视的一餐还有supper ，是简单的一顿晚饭。如果你已经把dinner当作主餐，那supper就是比之简单、随意的在睡觉前这段时间吃的一餐。

In the end, whether it is lunch, supper, brunch or dinner, it is a good idea to have four square meals every day.

最后的最后，不管是午餐、晚饭、早午餐还是晚餐，每天都吃四餐，对我们就最好不过了。

http://www.englishonline.org.cn/zh-hans/vocabulary-grammar/johnny-grammar/blog/dogs-dinner