Pylimitics

When someone “waffles,” they’re not cooking a breakfast pastry. Well, I suppose they could be, but generally that’s called “making waffles” instead. In the US, “waffling” is vacillating or dithering about a decision. Should you buy the blue shirt? It’s a nice color, but the pattern on the red shirt is nicer. So maybe you should get that one. But the green shirt is less expensive. So that could be the one… except that the orange shirt looks especially comfortable…

If you travel to England, you’ll still hear the term “waffling,” but it has nothing to do with equivocating. Over there it means droning on and on, talking without really saying much of anything, just continuing to utter a string of words without much of a point or purpose other than to keep talking for some reason, without imparting anything of importance to your audience, which after a few minutes you’ve almost certainly driven away anyway, leading to the absurd spectacle of talking to oneself at great length while managing to avoid illuminating even that listener. You get the idea.

The origin of both of these kinds of waffling was explained pretty clearly by Peter Levens in 1570: “To Woff like a dog…”. It’s pretty obvious how the English version version is related. The US version might be derived from one way you might act when you can’t make up your mind: you weigh each alternative out loud and as a result talk too much. 

But that leaves out the version of waffle you can have for breakfast. That one is a completely different word. It entered English a couple centuries later, from the Dutch word “wafer.” As you might guess, the English word “wafer” also comes from Dutch word. In spite of being identical, the two meanings of “waffle” don’t often get confused. That’s probably because nobody waffles about having waffles, and when you’re eating a waffle your mouth is too full to waffle.