Re: To waffle, ‘to waver, to vacillate, to equivocate, to dither’

On 25/04/2024 6:43 p.m., Aidan Kehoe wrote:

 Speaking (in sci.lang) of Andy Grove, he uses waffle in the above sense in his
good, well-edited ‘High Output Management.’ In my youth I would only have used
or understood the word in the meaning ‘to ramble on, to say nothing of much
consequence,’ and OED2 documents that the fail-to-make-a-decision sense is
colloquial or non-standard.
 I presume I have misunderstood various Americans over the years in not picking
up on the ‘dither’ meaning. How universal is that meaning over there?

A curious case. The two senses seem to me worth distinguishing, but pretty close to each other, so that some slippage or ambiguity would not be surprising.
A few more data points:
OED has the verb derived as a frequentative from "waff", an onomatopoetic dog vocalization (they say "yelp", but that doesn't seem quite right).
Clear attestation of both senses begins ca.1900.
The "dither" sense is said to be "Originally Scottish and northern dialect. Now colloquial or nonstandard."
The "blather" sense is not marked as dialectally restricted.
 From my point of observation: Deverson (NZOxDic) gives both senses for NZ. I think I hear "blather" more frequently.
My Macquarie (Aus, 1981) has:
(v) 1. to speak or write vaguely, pointlessly, and at considerable length;
2. to talk or write nonsense
(n) 3. verbosity in the service of superficial thought;
4. nonsense; twaddle
...all of which look like variants of "blather".
AHD (American, ca.1970) has neither -- no verb "waffle".
I can't make M-W work on this machine; so awaiting information on its current status in the USA, I would say: If Andy Grove (Hungarian-American) didn't pick it (the "dither" sense) up there, I'm guessing he is a man of enough experience and reading that he could have heard/read it from UK sources. (It may be "colloquial", but it does appear in print.)