Re: whinging poms again: (was Re: OT: whinging (was Re: rms on debian : background noise))
On Monday 01 September 2003 1:13 pm, Geoff Thurman wrote:
> 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
What an idiotic error. For 'tangentially', read 'in parallel'.
> 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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