Wellerism

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English

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Examples
  • "Out with it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden."
  • "Which I call adding insult to injury, as the parrot said when they not only took him from his native land, but made him talk the English language afterwards."

Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From Weller +‎ -ism, after the character Sam Weller in Charles Dickens' 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers.

Noun

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Wellerism (plural Wellerisms)

  1. A proverb, often a fatuous one, attributed to speaker in a situation.
    • 1939, The Modern Languages Forum, Volumes 24-25[1], Modern Language Association of Southern California, page 69:
      Examples of Romance Wellerisms are rather infrequent in literature and must be gathered from oral tradition.
    • 1958, Midwest Folklore, Volume 8[2], Indiana University, page 160:
      An examination of recent literature for Wellerisms might prove productive.
    • 1994, Wolfgang Mieder, Alan Dundes, The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb[3], University of Wisconsin Press, page 8:
      The Wellerism, which has its name from Sam Weller's use of many of them in Pickwick Papers, is much older than Dickens.

Synonyms

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Translations

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See also

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Further reading

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