Tuesday, November 14, 2006

"Whinge" indeed rhymes with "Binge"

Mignon commented on my last post:

"And are you trying to spell whine? Pronounced like the drink? Or a word rhyming with binge (as suggested in your title)?"

I knew then that if she, as an American and thoroughly versed in the intricacies of the English language (as you can see from her own blog at http://openingyourmind.blogspot.com), then "whinge" must be an Australian word.

So I grabbed the "Aussie Slang" Dictionary that my sister Liz sent Phil for Christmas last year. According to the author Sarah Dawson:

Whinge
To complain constantly and irritatingly.
A whinge is the act of doing this, and
a whinger is a person who does so too often.

So there you go. So often I have no idea that a particular word I am using is not a universal English word, but rather an Australian-invented term that I have grown up with, and therefore never realised the world at large was unaware of it. Quite often Phil has simply no idea what I am talking about!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, if it makes you feel any better, whinge was originally British (and we still use it extensively here!), so it was probably us whingeing poms who took it to Oz in the first place!

Hope all soon gets resolved with this blog access problem for you

Mia said...

Ohh you were whining! I was all lost there. I e-mailed you I think last week.

Mignon said...

And all along I thought you Aussies were just bad spellers. Glad to clear that up.