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
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