When I was a girl, it was bad manners to dunk a biscuit. Then I went abroad and found that Italian biscotti could scarcely be consumed in any other way. Back home, dunking a ginger nut seemed less criminal. Now I hear people using dunk and dump indifferently. Can this be right? After all, words of similar pronunciation, such as bought and brought, are often misused, one for the other, though the meaning is very different.
I’m not sure what word people used before dunk turned up, which was little more than 100 years ago. Did they say sod, seethe, soak? I was surprised to find that dunk is a borrowing from Pennsylvania German. This is often called Pennsylvania Dutch, but is a form of Palatine or southern German. So dunk derives from the same Indo-European origin that gave us Latin tingere, ‘to moisten’.
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