Over in the Pit there’s a thread entitled Endless. Boomer. Whining. and it made me think of how the usage of the verb * to whine* has changed over the last 10 or 20 years. Back in the day meant not just to complain, but to do so in a definitely particular tone of voice, with a rising and falling intonation on the emphasized word or syllable. Joe Piscopo and Robin Duke. on Saturday Night Live did a sketch where they played a couple named “The Weiners”, and they whined in just that way.
But now to whine seems to mean just to complain, and is used as a way of dismissing the complainer, or his complaints. In fact it seems to mean the same thing I hear some British people use, to whinge. This evolution is interesting. I did some googling but didn’t come up with any websites that discuss this sort of thing.
Anybody know of some?
Have a peep at www.wordorigins.org
It used to be a very good site for transatlantic translations as well as etymology. Ask any kind of a wordy question on there and someone will know the answer
There are a few SDMBers on there too.
Are you encountering this in real life, or just on the board? 'Cause I’ve always figured that its use on message boards and newsgroups was intended to be dismissive of the complaint by explicitly comparing it to the tiny tirades of a four-year-old in the back seat saying “Aren’t we the-e-ere yet?” or “Jason is loo-ooking at me!”
In other words, you are right that it is dismissive, but its use is intended to impose the “sound” of whining onto the printed comments of one’s opponents.
No, I hear it in “real life” all the time–not my in my own so much as in the popular culture. For instance, in a recent episode of *Six Feet Under * the intern-funeral director Arthur was just saying that he didn’t have any place to put a new body, 'cause the freezer was full, and that it would be a regulatory violation to leave it out. The partner Rico just snapped at him to quit whining, though he’d been talking in a normal tone of voice.