A character in an episode of "Coronation Street" complained that his fellow workers clammed up when he appeared in their midst and he theorized that perhaps they were having a winge. At least it sounded like "winge". [Rhymes with "binge".]

Anyone know what "having a winge" means?

http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=39942

whinge. Grumble, moan, complaint. Usually just to let off steam to similarly aggrieved persons rather than as a prelude to action.

Bingley

whinge. Grumble, moan, complaint.

Aha. The spelling is telling. "Whinge" as in "Whine".

Thanks. [Couldn't activate sjmaxq' link. Could you?]

Opened ok for me. He did sneak it in while I was composing my post though.

Bingley

The -ge is a frequentive affix, is it not?

What's frequentive, please?

There once was a man named Quentin who was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. A group of concerned folk banded together to reverse his conviction and secure his release. They were known as the Free Quentin Brigade. The parole board determined that there was a lot wrong with Quentin -- alcoholism, drug addiction, anti-social personality disorder, and a lisp -- all of which they wanted to see corrected (or at least addressed) before he was released from prison. The Free Quentin Brigade opposed the parole board's position, arguing that a wrongfully-detained person ought not have to be fixed before being set free. Their position came to be know as the a-fix ("a-" in the sense of "without") argument. It was referred to, for short, as the Frequentive Affix. And there you are.

TEd!! seriously, a worthy try, Father.

a worthy try

As these things go.

well i thought, i'm not having ol' faldage smarty pants just sittin there all smug an knowin mor'n'me, i'll jolly well find out meself. so i thought, not too rock surely, just type frequentive affix into google and pick the second one down ( always go to the second one first, dunno why), the url looks obscure enough
http://member.melbpc.org.au/~tmajlath/gram.html
okay, not helpful, but quite interesting
after about half an hour i remember my mission and click my google window, type in frequentive affixes and follow the lectric blue road to some yahoo group which won't let me and my smelly linux runner in so i go through a mirror and find a post referring to both frequentive affixes, within the context of something called quenya grammar. Hmm I think to myself , could this be a linguist or somesuch? Perhaps this Mr. Quenya has devised a special language theory.
oh no
I typed in quenya grammar to google and found myself in some crazy UMIST 'science' archive reading an article entitled : 'QUENYA GRAMMAR REEXAMINED', I DUNNO WHY HE WAS SHOUTING THOUGH.
damn you Faldage, It is half eleven at night, You have to tell me or I'll start typing in Elvish
vanwa alassenye , possibly
edit---- hmm , going to try thinking for myself. Is it something to do with the beginnings being the same, like snout sniff sneeze? is it something to do with wh- inge and wh-ine being a bit onamananatapaoeic (i'm going for the machine gun approach on the spelling front)? is it something really obvious that is going to make me look really stupid? please sir

Or you could assume I spelled it wrong and it was really frequentative, and look it up in a dictionary:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/11/F0321100.html

[gasp] you know, that never ocurred to me[/gasp]

hey, dody, you shouldacoulda known he'd try to disorientate you

FWIW, I didn't know frequentative, either.
Father Steve:
maverick: grr
onamananatapaoeic : I've always heard the expression shotgun approach. Did you young'uns go and change it on me?

And, thus, was added San to Quentin.

In my part of the world (my original part, that is) the word "whingeing" was always a prefix to the word "Pom". English immigrants to Zild often arrive expecting paradise and rapidly find out that the differences between the Land of the Long Whine Pom and the Land of the Long White Cloud are really more cosmetic than quantitative. At that point they start complaining, and rarely stop until they climb back on to the big white bird which brought them to La Zild in the first place. "Oh, just another whingeing Pom!" is a phrase often heard ...

more cosmetic than quantitative

They're disappointed because they don't get more of the same?

There was a slight consonant shift. Ran right on over the L...

Whereas of course our zilder has not uttered one single word of complaint since doing the journey in reverse.

Bingley

Yah, but I wasn't complaining about my expectations not being met. Just institutional stupidity ...