whinging poms again: (was Re: OT: whinging (was Re: rms on debian : background noise))
Apologies for picking up a dropped thread, particularly when it has
little (read nothing) to do with Debian, but a couple of things have
been gnawing away at my mind. I have snipped from various branches of
the thread:
On Tuesday 19 August 2003 01:40, Chris Metzler wrote:
> Um. . ."whinging" is perfectly correct, at least according to the
> Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster's 11th Ed. Collegiate,
> etc. It may not be in common use in the U.S., but it's used quite
> commonly in all other English-speaking countries (including, in
> particular, England).
>
> The word "whinge," meaning "to moan fretfully," actually predates
> the word "whine".
I'm not arguing that this last bit is untrue, I have no authority to do
so; but I find it strange. Whine seems more onomatopoeic to me, and
therefore more natural. And whereas whine is a more general-purpose
word (the wind can be said to do it, and animals, and nowadays sirens)
whinge is surely something that only people do. I feel that whine
*should* have predated whinge.
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 11:26:07AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
>
> I've only got a small OED here, but:
>
> whinge /windz/ v. & n. colloq. -- v.intr. whine; grumble peevishly.
--
> n. a whining complaint; a peevish grumbling. ** whinger n. whingingly
> adv. whingy adj. [OE hwinsian f. Gmc]
>
On 2003-08-19 at 11:54 + 2.00 I wrote
> Concise Oxford Dictionary gives whinge as (dialect or Australian) and
> tracks it back through Old English and Old High German to a probable
> root in the Germanic hwinisojan.
The same COD tracks whine back through OE whinan to Old Norse hvina.
The words all seem so similar that way back they must have the same
root, surely? At some stage they split, and ever since that split they
have been travelling tangentially down through the languages: they are
still next to each other now, at least in my single-volume dictionary.
The thing is, I can picture somebody long ago being told they whine
like the wind, but not so easily somebody describing the wind as
whinging like a person. It seems to me that the root would be closer to
whine than whinge.
The other thing troubling me in a vague back-of-the-mind fashion is
this:
On 2003-08-19 at 11:08, Kevin Mark wrote:
>On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 04:50, Dave Howorth wrote:
>> PS For any yanks who don't know the word, 'poms' is equivalent to
>>'limeys'
>
> Limeys - saliors eat limes to avoid scurvey
> POMS - prisoners of mother england
> equal?
-K
I don't recall ever hearing this Prisoners Of Mother England thing
before (although sometimes I don't recall things I was told yesterday).
My understanding was that it also came from the British habit of
carrying fruit on voyages to avoid scurvy, but in this case the
pomegranate rather than the lime. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable doesn't even mention this idea, though. It says that the origin
of Pommy or Pommie is uncertain, but that evidence suggests it came
from a mix of 'pomegranate' and 'immigrant', but with the former
referring not to the carrying of the fruit (which, as I say, they don't
even mention) but rather to the ruddy complexions of the English. The
POME theory is described as 'less convincing', although I must say it
has a good ring to it. One can well see the ships' manifests on the
convict voyages describing their cargo in just such a way. 'Port Out
Starboard Home' is considered doubtful too; it's odd how often books
just seem to *spoil* everything these days.
Geoff
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