English doesn’t care if you’re happy or sad. It ignores your shrill pleas for an orderly and logical vocabulary. As proof of this supreme indifference, we need look no further than the words founder And flounderfor no language that cares about its speakers would allow this kind of semantic cruelty.
‘Founder’ means “sink” or “collapse” or “fail.” ‘Flounder’ means “struggle to move” or “to continue clumsily.”
“Why is it so difficult? founder And flounder?” some of you are asking, perhaps in an arrogant tone (we can hear you, by the way); “train.” founder and everyone flounder … easy-squeezing lemonade.” The English language mocks your feeble attempts to insert a rhyming Britishism into a discussion of usage.
Ignore the fact that both of these words function as nouns (founder as a “setter” and flounder is “flat fish”), let’s see how the senses of verbs are often confused.
Founder is the older of the two, dating from the 14th century and has a useful etymology: it may be derived from the Latin Vulgar bottom of eyes, which means “bottom”. The reason that this is useful is one of the main contemporary meanings of founder is “to send (a ship) to the bottom.”
No one is quite sure where flounder comes from, although there is speculation that the word began to be used in the late 16th century, appearing as an alteration of founder. The earliest meanings of these words are somewhat related; founder was first used to mean “disabled” and flounder first used means stumble.
The point is that these words look and sound almost exactly the same, and each has a meaning that fits pretty well in the essay titled “Things Don’t Turn Out the Way I Had Expected.” The difference observed by most manuals is founder carries a stronger sense of complete failure (its synonym is sink, fallAnd failure) while flounder has many meanings “struggle” or “act clumsy”. One way to look at it is that you can flounder for a while and then finally founderbut you can not founder for a while and then flounder.
But a ship can flounder? There are certainly many instances where writers have used the word to describe the actions of a ship at sea that they should have used. founder:
When the Titanic hit the ice and wobbled and sank, the band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”—Bulletin of the National Rehabilitation Lending Association1918
However, there are also many cases where the writer has used flounder to describe a ship that is in fact struggling or moving inefficiently and in cases like these it makes no sense to use founder:
The storm had cleared, and scattered clouds were flying like lightning across the sky, while the sea, as far as the eye could see, was a vast expanse of undulating, undulating mountains—their background was blue. shining peas, and their peaks as white as snow. On and around our fine ships squirm like a mere toy.—naval magazine1848
He forgot that this great ship had struggled for days without seeing anything but water.—George Barr McCutcheon, West Wind Drifting1920
It should be noted that most of these examples come from hundreds of years ago or more, a time when people still hadn’t started to worry about whether they were misusing these two words. So yes, a ship can indeed flounderbut this might be one of those cases where you’d be better off just finding another word— (galumph, careful, buzz)—instead of having to explain why you chose a word that many people will reflexively assume you chose wrong.
In case you still don’t understand this, we’ll give another example of how these two words can be used in different contexts: If you were trying to figure out either of these words you would use any word in “Things didn’t turn out the way I hoped”, but still can’t figure it out, do you awkward; If you have given up depressed and have decided to consult the thesaurus to find some alternatives, then you can be said to have establish.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
