While continuing my voluntary English-proverb-excursion (‘dog-eat(…)-dog’, hi, Amy :)), I’ve encountered Wolf never wars against wolf.
It seems to be not a pure proverb, but that doesn’t matter in this topic.
My question is about to war.
The verb can be found in all dictionaries – even in small ones - as the third/forth meaning for war.
With war[color=red]ring as a gerund and warred as the Past Participle form.
By the way, Google seems to be a bit more tolerant to warred than to warring. (Not in terms of numbers-of-use, but… in the general reaction itself )
Whereas BNC is rather indifferent - both (‘warred’ and ‘warring’) are acceptable.
OK.
But to me it (actual use of the verb, I mean) is quite surprising.
They are parts of explanations of some English proverbs for Russians by giving some equivalent sayings or idioms.
In this case (‘Wolf …’) - for ‘There is honour among thieves’ and for ‘Hawk will not pick out hawk’s eyes.’.
P.S. By the way, ultimately I’ve found a reference to that ‘The mouse lordships where a cat is not’.
15th century.
I’ve looked at the Google results. I get a couple of references to the “Waring Company” on the first page, but other than that, it looks like most of the 5 million results are for warring. :shock:
For “warred”, the BNC results all look literary and there were only 14 results. (Actually, I’m surprised there were even that many. :lol:)
“Warring” had 194 results and the usages all look much more “normal” to me (i.e., not like some romance novelist looking for words to use that no normal person ever uses. :lol:)
Now, there’s one I’ve heard. (But when I hear it, there’s a “u” missing…;))
That’s very similar to something I’ve heard in German.
Ahhh… That explains why I hadn’t heard it? But it certainly seems to be quite true. I know my cats are excellent “mouse police”.