2020-09-29
151208-1 คำชวนสับสน ชุด F - Flounder – founder
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Dictionary.com
ออกเสียง “Flounder” = ‘FLOUN-der]
ออกเสียง “Founder” = ‘FOUN-der’
Abused, Confused, & Misused Words
flounder
to struggle clumsily: He floundered helplessly on the first day of his new job.; falter; waver; flop about; a marine flatfish
Not to be confused with:
founder – to fall or sink down; to become wrecked; to stumble; collapse; succumb: The project foundered because public support was lacking.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language
Usage Note: The verbs founder and flounder are often confused.
Founder comes from a Latin word meaning "bottom" (as in foundation) and originally referred toknocking enemies down; it is now also used to mean "to fail utterly, collapse."
Flounder means "to move clumsily, thrash about," and hence "to proceed in confusion." If John is foundering in Chemistry 101, he had better drop the course; if he is floundering, he may yet pull through.
found·er 2 (foun′dər) n.
One who establishes something or formulates the basisfor something: the founder of a university.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Did You Know?
Verb
Despite the fact that flounder is a relatively common English verb, its origins in the language remain obscure. It is thought that it may be an alteration of an older verb, founder.
To founder is to become disabled, to give way or collapse, or to come to grief or to fail. In the case of a waterborne vessel, to founder is to sink.
The oldest of these senses of founder, "to become disabled," was also used, particularly in reference to a horse and its rider, for the act of stumbling violently or collapsing. It may have been this sense of founder that later appeared in altered form as flounder in the sense of "to stumble."
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Usage Notes
Can a Ship 'Flounder'?
The difference between 'flounder' and 'founder'
The English language does not care if you are happy or sad. It is oblivious to your shrill entreaties for an orderly and sensible vocabulary. As proof of this supreme indifference we need look no further than the words founder and flounder, for no language that cares about its speakers would ever allow this kind of semantic cruelty to exist.
'Founder' means "to sink" or "to collapse" or "to fail." '
Flounder' means "to struggle to move" or "to proceed clumsily."
"What is so hard about founder and flounder?" some of you are asking, perhaps with a supercilious cast to your voice (we can hear you, by the way); "ships founder and people flounder ... easy peasy lemon squeezy." The English language scoffs at your feeble attempts to interject a rhyming Briticism into a discussion on usage.
Putting aside the fact that both of these words function as nouns (founder as “one who establishes” and flounder as “flatfish”), let’s look at how the verb senses have come to be often confused.
Founder is the older of these two, dating back to the 14th century, and has a useful etymology: it can be traced to the Vulgar Latin fundus, meaning “bottom.”
The reason that this is useful is that one of the main contemporary senses of founder is “to send (a ship) to the bottom.”
No one is entirely certain where flounder comes from, although there is speculation that the word, which began to be used at the end of the 16th century, came about as an alteration of founder.
The earliest senses of these words were somewhat related; founder was first used with the meaning of “to become disabled,” and flounder was first used to mean “stumble.”
The problem is that these words look and sound almost identical, and each one has meanings that would work quite well in an essay titled “Things That Did Not Go the Way That I Had Hoped.” The differencethat is observed by most usage guides is that founder carries a stronger sense of completed failure (its synonyms are sink, collapse, and fail) whereas flounder has more of a meaning of “struggle” or “act clumsily.” One way to look at it is that you can flounder for a while and then eventually founder, but you cannot founder for a while and then flounder.
But can a ship flounder? There are certainly many instances in which writers have used this word to describe the actions of a seaborne vessel where they would have been better off using founder:
Common Errors in English Usage Dictionary
As a verb, “founder” means “to fill with water and sink.” It is also used metaphorically of various kinds of equally catastrophic failures.
In contrast, to flounder is to thrash about in the water (like a flounder), struggling to stay alive. “Flounder” is also often used metaphorically to indicate various sorts of desperate struggle. If you’re sunk, you’ve foundered. If you’re still struggling, you’re floundering.
