When Did Snacks Become Snack?

Call me pernickety, but I have a personal grudge against the word "snack", as in "who is bringing snack for the kids' bocce team" or "she won't be hungry for the seitan tacos because she had snack."   Remember when a pack of pretzels called for an indefinite article - as in "did you have a snack at school today" - or perhaps a plural - as in "did they have snacks at the end of the meet?"

It's hard to provide a precise explanation for this odious turn, but we know one thing: the stature of the casual munch is on the rise.   Snack has been installed as the fourth, and in many cases, fifth meal of the day.  Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner.    The nutrition experts and pediatricians  are wringing their hands about this development for good cause: all the extra meals may end up fattening up our youngsters.  And the experts fear that this leads to lifelong obesity, early onset diabetes, etc. etc. etc. 

But I'm agitated for a different reason.  I just can't get comfortable with new singular.   In my view, a parent ought to send a snack, or snacks, to school.   And if we surrender to this snack-attack at school, can we at least draw a hard line at our front doors?  At home, if nowhere else, I want to know my child is having a snack - two snacks if she chooses both the Pirates Booty and the Oreos.

And yes, I did choose pernickety over persnickety - much as I prefer kerfuffle to kerfluffle.

Comments

[Lawrence Solum]

Isn't this actually an appropriate linguistic development? "Snack" in the relevant sense is best understood as a mass noun and not a count noun. And there is a related sense count-noun sense of the term.

[Bruce Boyden]

It's an event, just like lunch, which is no longer just "lunches" or "a lunch."

[Dan Filler]

The development is an accurate reflection of the culture and in that sense, is utterly linguistically appropriate. But I dislike the cultural move as well as the lexical aesthetics. I told you I was pernickety!

[Lawrence Solum]

I don't think that Bruce is correct in the context of the initial example. "To bring snack" is not "to bring the event," it is "to bring stuff that constitutes a snack." That stuff is an undifferentiated mass and hence is appropriately the basis for a mass noun. Dan says that he is persnickety, but my view is that he is not persnickety enough. The change in linguistic practice is in line with "deep structure" of English grammer & the new usage is actually "more correct" than the old usage.

[Miriam A. Cherry]

Mmmm... snack....

[Matt Lister]

I must say that most snacks are not an undifferentiated mass, but rather things like cookies, chips, carrots, etc. That is, they are countable and should be count nouns. If your snacks are an undifferentiated mass, you've made them wrong! (Or you're having pudding, but even then, you divide it up into quite distinct, countable portions.)