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The Meaning Of Hungering

Decent Essays

“Mom! I’m Starving! What’s for dinner?”

Were you starving for lunch today? If you had answered yes, I hope that you haven’t eaten in 8 days. The meaning of starvation has greatly changed over time from something literal, to children or young adults using it when they are cranky and haven’t eaten in a couple of hours.

The Merriam-Webster definition of the word starving is: ‘(of a person or animal) suffer severely or die from hunger’. The definition itself displays that if a person is starving, then they would be in the path of death soon. If there is a known time of when your next meal will be received, are you starving? I would say no; this leads to a hope of when your body can receive nutrition again and gain energy to power up the body. Let’s refer back to the title of this paper, “Mom! I’m Starving! What’s for dinner?”, those words are something that children would have asked their mothers on an everyday basis. Once symbolizing the meaning of a person about to die due to not having enough nutrition inside of their body. The word starving has stranded away from its true meaning, and today is used to represent just hunger that is found when a person might have skipped a single meal.

The child in the scenario with the title, most likely was able to eat lunch or even breakfast at school. In the best outcome for the child, let’s call him Johnny, we can say that he hasn’t eaten since breakfast this morning, which was served to him around the time of 7am. Now

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