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

Etymology

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, 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, 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, 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.

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Further reading
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