The word picnic originated with the French phrase repas à piquenique (picnic meal) and may have derived from the verb piquer (to pick/peck).
Entering the English language around 1750, it was used variously to describe an outdoor meal or an assortment of food to be shared among a group. During the first half of the 19th century, a Picnic Society was formed in London and met regularly at the Pantheon in Oxford Street. By the 1860s, references to picnic baskets, pies, teas, lunches and hampers were becoming commonplace, and the most celebrated and popular English novelist of the mid-19th century, Charles Dickens, gave his seal of approval in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which the delightfully named Miss Twinkleton contributes “herself and a veal pie to a picnic” in the sunny countryside. This marked a change of scene for Dickens, who was better known for his vivid descriptions of murky London. Indeed the popularity of the picnic in Britain would often prove to be a triumph of good intentions over bad weather.
In the United States, meanwhile, the word took on a new meaning when in 1884 a journalist observed that the daily grind of his job was “no picnic”. In recent decades, this use of the word has become increasingly popular. While Yogi Bear cartoons have flown the flag for traditional picnicking in Jellystone Park, and popular films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock immediately conjure an image of the outdoors, we are just as likely to hear the word used as a general reference for something easy and pleasurable. This point was made in the writing of Alain Gaudet, a Canadian paratrooper who described his military service in Cyprus in the 1970s in a combat diary titled “This Ain’t No Picnic, It’s War”.
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