Wellerism

English

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

• wellerism

Etymology

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

Noun

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

• apologetic proverb

Translations

proverb

• Finnish: wellerismi
• German: Wellerismus (de) m, Sagwort (de) n
• Italian: wellerismo (it) m

See also

• Tom Swifty

Further reading

• Wellerism on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Tom Swifty on Wikipedia.Wikipedia