In the interest of my continued sanity let’s just go over the proper spelling of the various forms of the word ‘whine’.
Please note that, at no point…
Does the gerund form of the word acquire an extra ‘G’!
ahem
It’s not ‘whinging’…it’s ‘whining’.
I’ve seen this so often on the boards that I actually had to go look and see if the spelling-powers-that-be had changed it when I wasn’t looking. English can be tricky that way. You think you’ve got it down and then BANG! They add ‘walkman’ to Websters.
So please…
In the interest of my personal sanity.
Leave the ‘G’ out. You’re all adults (except maybe 'pun. But we love him anyway). All I ask is that we, as a group, stop mis-spelling this word.
Again…
‘whinging’ = BAD, you will surely burn in the pit of damnation.
‘whining’ = GOOD, puppies and bunnies love you. And damn, you’re a sexy cuss, too.
I also notice a lot of people misspell weird and a lot. They both really bug me. You can go ahead and add them to the “stop spelling these easy-to-spell words wrong list.”
Yo La Tengo, you’re right about weird, but I spelled it incorrectly for years. It violates that “I before E” rule, so it’s bound to be an easy word to miss.
Well, at any rate, even if you had no one would have called you a Bloody Whinging Pom, so you can be excused for not knowing the word. But don’t let me catch you complaining about it again.
Pfff… how stupid would “Bloody Whining Pom” sound?
Primaflora, pray tell: what is the subtle but important difference between ‘whining’ and ‘whinging’? I’ve always thought that the only difference was that one made you sound British.
I once had a restaurant boss who was a worse speller than I. All of us at work made fun of him because he was a bit high on ego and low on itellect. Anyway he wrote us a memo once about making sure we were “moping the floors at closing”. That little goof always stayed in my mind.
When he wasn’t around I’d shuffle around with a pathetic look on my face.When the co-workers asked what I did - I replied “What’s it look like…I’m moping the floors!”.
So whenever someone else mispeels a word., don’t let it anoy you…just grin and bare it.
Just my opinion, to add something to Primaflora’s post: while “whine” as in “oh, you whiner, you”, has connotations of something that happens in a single instance – a complaining sound – a “whinge” is something petty, negative, incessant, and “whinger” never stops complaining, no matter what happens. Hence the “whinging Poms” cliche. But the two are also interchangeable, here in NZ.
And if I’ve spelled something wrong in the above – well, sorry. I’m another of the “weird” ones with a blindspot as far as the word is concerned.
Yes indeed… “whinge” is a real word… I learned it from one of my Australian friends some time ago.
As for misspelled words that bug me (besides the ones mentioned above), I have these friends that almost always spell “writing” and “eating” with a double T. Aaarrgghh!! It just bugs me! This one friend of mine also spells “awful” as “aweful”… I teased him about it once (“Yeah, I’m sure that feeling full of awe is a VERY valid reason to not come into work”), hoping to gently correct him. He got my humor, but not the correction, alas.
Then there are the people who misspell “definitely” as “definately”… don’t get me started!
How about more homonyms, guys? For example, people who freely interchange “hear” and “here”; “there”, “their”, and “they’re”; and more, besides? (like “its” and “it’s”)
[slight hijack]
I’ll always remember the time my mother thought that she’d get me to be sensible in my English spelling tests. (somehow, she got her hands on my copy of one that I’d done particularly badly on, which was unusual for me) She was attempting to pronounce the word “gripe”, but instead it came out “grip”! I was almost tempted to spell it that way (she made me give the corrected version to her to look at later), but didn’t. It was definitely funny, though!
[/slight hijack]
I’m not saying I’m a perfect speller, and I know that there have been times when I’ve gotten manic about correcting errors (a fair number of times on these very boards, too), but can’t we all just learn to differentiate between words that sound the same, for example? That might actually be helpful to the universe at large, you know!
I was almost tempted to spell it that way (she made me give the corrected version to her to look at later), but didn’t. It was definitely funny, though!