Whodunit, whydunit and howdunit I'm currently watching the TV series "The Sinner" with Bill Pullman. This series is not a typical crime story, a whodunit, where the detective is looking for the offend

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Miriam

Whodunit, whydunit and howdunit

I'm currently watching the TV series "The Sinner" with Bill Pullman. This series is not a typical crime story, a whodunit, where the detective is looking for the offender but he wants to know why the offender did what they did and this kind of crime story is called a whydunit. Then there's the howdunit, where the focus of the story is to find out how a crime was committed. The terms whodunit, whydunit and howdunit don't have any equivalents in German. So, if I had to translate the sentence "The TV series The Sinner is a whydunit" I wouldn't know what else to do, than rephrase it like this "In der Fernsehserie Der Sünder geht es darum herauszufinden, warum eine Tat begangen wurde." Hm, not very elegant.

Do you know languages where they have similar terms? Do you know any whydunits and howdunits?

23 ก.ค. 2020 เวลา 18:49

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We don't have any such expressions, I don't think. Wouldn't "ein Warumer" work in German? :)

23 กรกฎาคม 2020

The moot point is, how does any word come into existence in the first place? If one describes a word as "a sequence of sounds" which they inherently are, then no word has any meaning unless we ascribe a specific meaning to it with other words. It's a fairly arbitrary human made structure in its most basic form. At the very origin, every word was "coined" by some known or unknown person. The categories can be:

Common words: is, was, and, or, hop, skip, jump

Obscure words: Whiffle, Poltophagy, Alsym

Jargon: bandpass, Nyquist criterion, Schottky diode

Infotech: void(), null pointer, function argument

Obsolete words: ye, thou, thee, verily, assay

Slang and swear words: (intentionally left blank)

Transient words and expressions: (countless)

Crazy words: floccinaucinihilipilification, antidisestablishmentarianism

24 กรกฎาคม 2020

I agree with Dan. "Whodunit" exists ... the others not so much.

The examples you've provided seem obscure to me. Just because a writer chooses to hype the word in a newspaper article doesn't mean it's in common use. By definition, these writers are trying to stand out with "new" and "different" expressions.

23 กรกฎาคม 2020

Based on what I've learned in this thread, there is another issue: I think it is very likely that whydunnit and howdunit can be classified as technical words, that are understood and used for communication between people within some relatively narrow field. In this case I suppose they are used by mystery fiction fans.

Although big dictionaries go a long way to include technical terms that a lay reader might encountered, they all draw a boundary and acknowledge that they omit specialized technical terms.

For example, hirsutene is showing a red line underneath it and isn't in m-w.com, but a Google Books search shows that it occurs, and since the books it occurs in are written in English, I consider it to be an English word. It communicates nothing to me, however.

Miriam, I assure you that if you were to say in conversation "I just read a great whydunit the other day," ordinary English speakers would look puzzled. Then they might brighten up and say, "Oh, you meant to say whodunit." An alert listener might say "Do you mean, like a whodunit but with why?" In writing, most would realize that it was not a mistake and would guess the meaning correctly. You could use it in casual conversation in a way that half-defined it and be easily understood: "I just read a great mystery the other day, more of a whydunit than a whodunit."

I feel sure that every field of genre fiction has a technical terminology. Get a couple of science-fiction fans arguing over whether Nineteen Eighty-Four is science-fiction, or where to draw the line between fantasy and science-fiction, or between just plain science-fiction and "hard" science-fiction.

Is it a word? Is that even a well-defined question? Maybe. I think we can say that "btzptpqvvvvkxz" is not a word yet, but even there I feel I need to add the word yet to be safe. Runcible was not a word until Edward Lear used it in a poem in 1871. Now it is.

25 กรกฎาคม 2020

The definition of the word "discussion", as in discussions posted in italki's Discussion section

1 the activity in which people talk about something and tell each other their ideas or opinions:

2 consideration of a question in open and usually informal debate

3 consideration or examination by argument, comment, etc., especially to explore solutions; informal debate.

Gee... correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe I just saw the word "argument" in one of the definitions, a synonym of "debate"... oh, another word used to define discussion.

24 กรกฎาคม 2020

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Miriam

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