It's back to school, and I happily rediscover all the little graces of an educational establishment that reopens its doors to students: there reigns a gentle torpor at the beginning of September;
silent and depopulated (but not for long), the playground has been cleaned from top to bottom, soon it will welcome new chalk drawings, the cries of the "little ones" will make you forget the wind;
the long, still deserted corridors quiver with expectation;
empty rooms gradually regain their lucidity after two months of vacation ...
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What about the canteen in all of this?
She is already preparing to collapse under the hundreds of steps which rush to avoid queuing;
it is already echoing with a din made of colliding meal trays, clicking of cutlery… and I can already hear the reactions to reading the first menu of the year: “Oh no, there are no fries! ", "This is not good!"…
A place decried by students, parents and staff alike, the canteen nevertheless constitutes an undeniable place of sociability, well beyond its nurturing function.
How did a single word come to designate this double reality?
The first official definition of "canteen" dates from 1680;
we find it in the French Dictionary, containing the words and things of César-Pierre Richelet.
The lexicographer speaks of it as "a small chest which the army uses to transport bottles".
A canteen in the cellar
To tell the truth, this kind of safe has existed since the late Middle Ages: it is in fact a compartmentalized trunk, designed for the transport of bottles, but also provisions, utensils and, more generally, effects. personal. These traveling pieces of furniture are then particularly appreciated by merchants, nobles and officers in the countryside, so many individuals who often take the highways. A canteen is all the more practical since it can be placed in the corner of a room; this is why one can rightly think that, for his definition, Richelet relied on an Italian etymological origin, the term canto meaning, among other things, an "exterior or interior angle, formed by the meeting of two walls".
In the 18th century, the linguist Abel Boyer broadened the meaning of the word “canteen”, by qualifying its definition in the Royal French-English and English-French Dictionary of 1780. He designated it as a fixed or traveling reserve, mainly intended for the military, in which food, drink, medicine and tobacco are stored. It seems that the roots are again Italian, insofar as the cantina designates the “cellar”, the “cellar”, that is to say the storage space par excellence.
It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the canteen acquired a third meaning, and finally indicated a refectory where catering services were offered for civilian communities, such as schools, hospices, barracks or prisons. As far as school canteens are concerned, a lot has changed; for example, alcoholic beverages for students have been totally prohibited there since 1981. Sociability must now be done differently ...