Waddle
The word waddle is often used of ducks, referring to the characteristic way they move, using short steps and moving from one side to the other. From a linguistic point of view, it is interesting because it contains –le, a frequentive, i.e. a morpheme which indicates that something happens frequently, also contained in wriggle, paddle, hobble, sparkle, dazzle and others. (Quinion 2009: 342-3)
Waited
Most English speakers pronounce the suffix /I d/ , whereas most Americans say /‚ d/. Other examples are wanted or started.
Well, the milkman has come
Imagine the following exchange: A: ‘Can you tell me the time?’ – B: ‘Well, the milkman has come.’ What will A make of B’s answer? He might, of course, just discard it as rubbish, as irrelevant to his question. But probably he wouldn’t. Probably he would assume that the answer is relevant to his question. Then his train of thought might be like this: ‘B cannot give a full answer to my question, but he may assume that the milkman’s coming provides a partial answer to my question. He assumes that I know at what time the milkman usually comes, and indicates in this way that it must at least be later than that’. The fact that communication works like this shows that people, even if they do not seem to be cooperating they do so at a deeper level. (cf. Gramley/Pätzold 1992: 213)
Whales
In class, when discussing a graffiti which included the words “Free Wales!”, a student started making comments which did not seem to make much sense until it turned out that she was talking about whales, not Wales. Although the words are spelt differently, they are, of course, now pronounced the same – but not by all speakers of English. Speakers of non-standard form of English and also some speakers of Standard English still make a distinction, pronouncing whales with an initial /h/, and this distinction is still reflected in the spelling. Originally, the spelling was often , and this reflects the pronunciation more closely, but this form was gradually replaced by (cf. Crystal 2005: 141).
When are you going home?
You would normally ask this question with a falling intonation, but a low rise at the end is not unusual. That can make quite a difference. It permits you to sound more friendly, less absolute. A rise leaves more room for the addressee to answer freely, even, for example, by remarking that he is not planning to go home right now. (Gramley/Pätzold 1992: 112-3)
Wholly
Does wholly sound different form holy? It probably does. It sounds a bit as if the /l/ was longer. In reality, is rather occurs twice, marking the end of whole and the beginning of – ly, although the two sounds merge into each other. (Davis 2004: 79)
Wikipedia
In the early days of the personal computer, programming languages tended to be rather complicated things to learn and moreover, slow to use. In 1994, a certain Ward Cullingham developed a system which made the use of related webpages much easier and, above all, much quicker. Because it was so quick, he called it wikiwikiweb, wiki being the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’. The reduplication was used to say that it was very quick indeed. Soon, however, people thought that wikiwiki was a bit cumbersome and shortened it to simply wiki. That was the state of affairs when Larry Sanger came across the word in 2001. He decided to create a collaborative, web-based encyclopaedia which would use the wiki system. He took the words wiki and encyclopaedia and formed the word wikipedia. The word encyclopaedia comes from classical Athens, where children were taken through the whole cycle of learning. Their knowledge was supposed to be en-cyclo-paedic. The Romans were so impressed that they started writing books which contained articles on everything that there was, encyclopaedias. The paedia part of encyclopaedia, the one that refers to children, is preserved in wikipedia, which literally means ‘fastchild’. Not a piece of knowledge shared by many of the millions of users of Wikipedia. (Forsyth 2016: 2016-217)
With a pinch of salt
It is often believed that this comes from classical Latin, but there does not seem to be any evidence of this. It is more likely a piece of medieval Latin. The meaning is clear: just as a sprinkling of salt makes one’s meal more enjoyable, so a doubtful story goes down easier cum grano salis – with a pinch of salt. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 163-4)
Woman
The word woman does not, as modern folk-etymologies have it, derive from womb-man. It derives from wif-man. (A relict of this can be seen in the modern pronunciation of women) The modern form has given rise to the suspicion that woman is “only” the marked form of man and, as such, a form of despreciation of women. Originally, however, man did not mean ‘male’ but ‘human’. And the original form of man was actually wæp-man, ‘armed human’. As in this example, the apparent derivational relations of words can turn out to be historically inaccurate. (Rundblad & Kronenfeld 1998: 26)
Word
The word word is clearly ambiguous. If you are asked how many words there are in a particular dictionary we take the word word in one sense, if asked to write a 2000-word-essay on a particular topic we take the word in another sense. (Lyons 1981: 101)
Worm
“Therewith began a fearful battle between worm and man” wrote William Morris in the nineteenth century. A sentence that does not make much sense to modern ears – unless one realises that worm here is used in its old sense of ‘dragon’. (Forsyth 2016: 175)
Wot ‘ e wuz giv’n
This is a classical example of what is often referred to as eye-dialect. It may be found in novels or other literary works and is a specific character’s way of saying ‘What he was given’. Clearly, it is meant to represent a non-standard speaker of English, but, as a matter of fact, it doesn’t! This is the way everyone speaks. It could be taken as the normal representation of this sentence spoken by a speaker of Standard English. Nevertheless, when we see it in a novel, we do not take it like that, but understand it as the words of a non-standard speaker, although we don’t know what is non-standard about it (cf. Crystal 2005: 486).
Wow!
Wow!, a modern word expressing surprise, admiration, has found its way into other languages besides English in recent years. Modern it appears to us, but it is not that at all. As a matter of fact, it is quite old. Thomas Dermondy, one of the Scottish „Graveyard Poets“, uses it in one of his poems at the end of the 18th century. But it is older still. Its first documented occurrence is in a translation of Virgil‘s Aeneid, of 1513! Its author was Gavin Douglas, another Scottish writer. One can say that Wow! is uniquely and originally Scottish. So much so that, as Janer Sorenson has argued, it subverted „eighteenth-century British linguistic propriety“ and was consequently excluded from Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language)! (Griffin 2013: 134).
Writer
When British speakers say writer, the is pronounced as /t/. Not so when American speakers say writer. They realise when it comes between vowels with a flap of the tongue tip against the alveolar ridge. This sound is often perceived as /d/, but it isn’t, it is rather like the flapped /r/ of RP very. Anyway, as intervocalic is also tapped, and between vowels cannot be distinguished, and so hurting sounds like herding, helter sound like held’er, totem sounds like towed’em, futile sounds like feudal, and writer sounds like rider. To make things more complicated, this does not apply when the following syllable is stressed. That is why you get atom with a flap but atomic with /t/. (Gramley/Pätzold 1992: 339).
Wug
A completely fictitious word, which was used in an experiment with children made in the 1950s. The children were asked questions which made them use the plural of the word, which, of course, they had never heard before. The children produced wugs, i.e. / w à g z / (Matthews 2003: 80). They thus showed that they ‘had learnt the rule’ of regular plural formation in English.