-ench

On March 27, horrificgoth posted on tumblr

(crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts

resulting in 56,876 notes so far. One of them, posted Saturday 5/10 by Seebs, was

i’m more mad about this than i might otherwise be because someone pointed out the “-ench” suffix in English a while back:

drink -> drench

cling -> clench

we used to have a form for “to cause-to” on verbs. and yes, there was apparently a q verb for fire-going-out that led to “quench”.

sadly, people refuse to acknowledge my other example:

wink -> wench

The causative story is correct for drench and quench, according to the OED, as long as the "we" that used to have the form goes back to Old English:

The OED's etymology for clench is less clear about the causative morphology, but still consistent with it:

Needless to say, wench as the causative of wink is a joke.

For me the most interesting thing about (the comments on) these tumblr posts is the modern fashion for vivid noms de réseau social: annielovescuteships, orthoeatspaperslips1, lilacborrower, traggalicious, trashbaby1996, hohohomyass, big-scary-bird, hypersexual-brainvomit, testosteronetuesdays, totally-not-an-awkard-okapi, ewwcringe, …