Damn.

According to my good friends at www.dictionary.com:

whinge (hwnj, wnj) intr.v. Chiefly British whinged, whing·ing, whing·es

To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.

[Dialectal alteration of Middle English whinsen, from Old English hwinsian.]

whine Pronunciation Key (hwn, wn) v. whined, whin·ing, whines v. intr.

1. To utter a plaintive, high-pitched, protracted sound, as in pain, fear, supplication, or complaint.

2. To complain or protest in a childish fashion.

3. To produce a sustained noise of relatively high pitch: jet engines whining.

[Middle English whinen, from Old English hwnan, to make a whizzing sound.]

So, looks like they're kissing cousins, etymologically speaking, at the very least.

You may now all throw your preferred dictionaries at me. Gently please. I don't bruise as easily as ita, but it can be done.

Double damn. Please be careful, Calistas.

Do you pronounce a "g"?

No, just pronounced like "wine," but with a bit of a, well, whine to the voice. Actually, I'd never heard of "whinge", pronounced with a g, until I started posting here. Nor did I ever get the joke from Harry Potter of his hometown of Little Whinging until just a few weeks ago, when rereading the books.

Huh. At first, I was thinking that I luckily hadn't been exposed to much negative sexualization as a woman and as a child. I was starting to work out how I could feel minimalized by this, but then it occurred to me.

No, I do have an awareness of people around me in public areas that the SO does not have. And he feels no compunction about just talking to random people on the street, and the reason I don't doesn't just have to do with being introverted, it also has to do with being female.

I don't check the backseat or under the car, though I do get my keys out in order to move more quickly, and I do park under a light, without thinking about it.

And it wasn't until just now that I realized it, but I have had people complain about me not noticing them trying to get my attention in traffic. At the time I told them it was because I'm oblivious in traffic, that all the other cars are merely obstacles to my destination, but it's true that it's developed behavior because most of the time, I don't really want to respond to whatever the attention-getter is trying to say.

So, huh.

Yeah, I was down looking at the LA Times. Holy cow. Please be safe, LAistas.

Oops?

That road totally needs the roadsigns my dad procured for the observatory. Not the usual falling rock signs that usually just feature the rocks, this one had the car profile, with a rock headed down the cliffside at it. It was morbidly hilarious. And kept getting stolen (despite being on a fairly out of the way route) until they welded the damn thing to the post and put the post in concrete. I love that sign.

I was walking my dog once and a car was coming up the hill around a corner and a guy started yelling something out the window - not an uncommon thing along that road. I studiously ignored it, and thus didn't realize what he was saying until I rounded the corner and found myself in the middle of a dog v. deer showdown on the sidewalk.

(On both sides, it pretty much consisted of standing stock still and staring, but the dog could so easily have startled the deer out into traffic.)

in order to move more quickly

This is a big part of it -- I remember being explicitly told to do the keys-in-a-claw thing in college, and I don't do it anymore, but the whole idea of getting TO the car, INTO the car, LOCK the car, START the car, without stopping to fuck around or dig in my bag is completely internalized. It drives me bugfuck when S. wants to stop and chat with someone with the door hanging open in the parking lot on the way out of the gym -- even though by definition I'm not alone (and am on friendly territory and probably have some pretty serious bruisers right nearby).

And that's without any particular fear -- it's more like the mode I'm in on the strip. Ready to react to any little human movement.

Do you pronounce a "g"?

Doesn't Mal pronounce the "g" in Firefly? I seem to recall it as such. But I could be mistaken.

Wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides, torrential rains, big ass rocks. Tell me again about the attractions of living in Southern California.