DCHP-2

bunfight informal bun fight, bun-fight DCHP-2 (October 2016)

• 1 † n. — now rare, Food

  a large party or dinner, usually unruly.

  This meaning of bunfight developed from the literal meaning 'food fight where buns are thrown'. This meaning is losing currency to meaning 2 and, in the Canadian context, meaning 3.
  See also COD-2, s.v. "bunfight", which is marked "Cdn, Brit. & Austral slang", and OED-3, s.v. "bun-fight", W-3, s.v. "bun-fight", which is marked "slang Brit".

  • Note that meanings 1 and 2 are 'dagger' terms, as explained in the introduction, and thus not Canadian.

• 2 † n. — humorous, Food

  a jocular way of referring to a meal.

  Occasionally, the term refers to an ordinary meal. While OED-3 lists the meaning 'tea party' (s.v. "bun" (n.2), "bun-fight"), this term is either a Semantic Change in North America (the meaning is found in the US as well) or a Preservation of a British meaning not documented in OED-3. The latter interpretation would depend on W-3's correct labelling as "slang Brit" (s.v. "bun-fight").

• 3 n. — Politics, slang

  a situation characterized by widespread argument and dispute, particularly between political institutions or entities.

  Type: 3. Semantic Change — This meaning, which is often applied in political contexts (see the quotations since 1982), including the media (e.g., the 1978 quotation) and unions (e.g., the 2013 quotation), developed out of a figurative extension of meaning 1. This is the most popular Canadian meaning and there is good evidence to consider it a Canadian innovation. The claim to distinct Canadianness is based on the specialized meaning, which has been extracted from close readings of the search results in the .za, .uk and .ca domains (see Chart 1). Meanings in .za and .uk domains are either meaning 1 or a general dispute. The political reading, as seen in meaning 3, however, seems to be particularly frequent in, if not to say near-exclusive to, Canada.

  • In the North American context, the form is three times as frequent in Canada as in the US, which might indicate a Preservation of the form from British English, with subsequent semantic specialization.