There was a linguistic shift to prefer 吃. I would say it probably happened in the Cultural Revolution. In Cantonese 食 is pronounced "sek", and is regularly used

There was a linguistic shift to prefer 吃. I would say it probably happened in the Cultural Revolution. In Cantonese 食 is pronounced "sek", and is regularly used - "sek fan" as in "eat rice". Since HK was quite insulated from the Cultural Revolution, and evidence from older texts that use 食 all the time (喫 was not really used IINM), it would not be amiss to say that the development to prefer 吃 is quite new. Hence in my other post I mentioned that it was political agenda that drove selection of preferred words to use. addendum: I think there is also a nice narrative in the shift to use 吃 - it was more a "commoner" word, and communism was then about replacing the elite sounding words with simpler words that is common to everyone. 乞 is most commonly used with 乞丐 (begger), but the etymology of the word comes from qi (气) according to zhongwen.com