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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Over on another forum, I ran into this sentence:
We all have known HS athletes that go on to college and whimper out,http://www.etiquettehell.com/smf/index. … c=58691.15
Most other instances I’ve been able to find seem linked to the idea of actual sounds. But I thought this was a fun idea.
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< whimper is in fact suggested as an etymology for wimp and is fairly reasonable as such things go. It might be a back-formation, with – er as a kind of frequentative verbal ending (cf. patter, stutter, stammer, fritter, bicker, flicker, flutter and lots of other forms) used to verbalize the noun. For those of us who distinguish initial wh from w in pronunciation, it does not work so well, but many, it seems like most, English speakers do not.
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(Not to start another long discussion, but – er has a lot in common with the sound-symbolic quasi-morphemic whatchamacallems, though occasionally the thing it connects to is an independently identifiable stem, e.g. flick and perhaps pat from the list above.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-06-05 18:04:49)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Not to start another long discussion, but – er has a lot in common with the sound-symbolic quasi-morphemic whatchamacallems
That wouldn’t be me you are referring to, would it?
Nuttin’ wrong with morphemic ”-er” and ”-el/le.” Any diachronic understanding of English grammar would recognize the morphological independence of these suffixes.
For frequentative ”-er” the OED cites batter, chatter, clamber, flicker, glitter, mutter, patter, quaver, shimmer, shudder, slumber. Your list adds a few more (“Fritter” probably does not belong in the list. Too bad. “Frit” would make such a good Teutonic root. I can imagine it meaning “to carve into thin slices, especially roasted boars and captured Romans.”).
For frequentative/diminutive ”-el/le” the OED has nestle, twinkle, wrestle, crackle, crumple, dazzle, hobble, niggle, paddle, sparkle, topple, wriggle, babble, cackle, gabble, giggle, guggle, mumble.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I was just frittering away the time thinking of a few examples, he stammered.
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Sure, I was thinking of our discussion over on the soapbox. Should we continue this there?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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