{"id":69130,"date":"2025-05-12T06:27:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T11:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=69130"},"modified":"2025-05-12T08:42:37","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T13:42:37","slug":"ench","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=69130","title":{"rendered":"-ench"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On March 27, horrificgoth posted on tumblr<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">(crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts<\/span><\/p>\n<p>resulting in 56,876 notes so far. One of them, <a href=\"https:\/\/the-real-seebs.tumblr.com\/post\/783175472139943936\/im-more-mad-about-this-than-i-might-otherwise-be\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted Saturday 5\/10 by Seebs<\/a>, was<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">i\u2019m more mad about this than i might otherwise be because someone pointed out the \u201c-ench\u201d suffix in English a while back:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">drink -&gt; drench<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">cling -&gt; clench<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">we used to have a form for \u201cto cause-to\u201d on verbs. and yes, there was apparently a q verb for fire-going-out that led to \u201cquench\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">sadly, people refuse to acknowledge my other example:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">wink -&gt; wench<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The causative story is correct for <em>drench<\/em> and <i>quench<\/i>, according to the OED, as long as the \"we\" that used to have the form goes back to Old English:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/OED_drench.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/OED_drench.png\" width=\"490\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/OED_quench.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/OED_quench.png\" width=\"490\" title=\"Click to embiggen\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The OED's etymology for <em>clench<\/em> is less clear about the causative morphology, but still consistent with it:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/OED_clench.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/OED_clench.png\" width=\"490\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Needless to say, <em>wench<\/em> as the causative of <em>wink<\/em> is a joke.<\/p>\n<p>For me the most interesting thing about (the comments on) these tumblr posts is (how they exemplify) the modern fashion for vivid noms de r\u00e9seau social: <em>annielovescuteships, orthoeatspaperslips1, lilacborrower, traggalicious, trashbaby1996, hohohomyass, big-scary-bird, hypersexual-brainvomit, testosteronetuesdays, totally-not-an-awkard-okapi, ewwcringe,<\/em> &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>[h\/t <a href=\"http:\/\/linsee.seebs.net\/\" target=\"_blank\">Linda Seebach<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On March 27, horrificgoth posted on tumblr (crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts resulting in 56,876 notes so far. One of them, posted Saturday 5\/10 by Seebs, was i\u2019m more mad about this than i might otherwise be because someone pointed out the \u201c-ench\u201d suffix [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69130"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69134,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69130\/revisions\/69134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}