What the Hell is a whipersnaper?
Never figured that out.
Whippersnapper (not whipersnaper) is a young and inexperienced person considered to be presumptuous or overconfident.
“I know her better than you do, you young whippersnapper!”
I understood it that younger coach/stage/buggy drivers would compensate for lack of experience by overusing the whip on the team - thus young ‘whip’er’snap’per
I have no factual information to back this up.
A whippersnapper was a young kid with a toy whip that had a cord on the end that snapped or popped or cracked if you flipped the whip correctly. The term “cracker” was coined by black slaves referring to the overseer who usually carried a whip, and frequently “cracked” it to demonstrate his power.
That’s why you are a whippersnapper. 8>)
Whipersnaper was a smart ass.
Whippersnapper:
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/whipper-snapper.html
The meaning of ‘whipper snapper’ has altered over the years, originally referring to a young man with no apparent get up and go, to be applied to a youngster with an excess of both ambition and impudence.
You’ve never snapped a whip?
“A whip-snapper was a seventeenth-century term for a young man with nothing better to do than to hang about idly snapping a whip. Whippersnapper is one of those rare terms that has a somewhat literal origin. Today, the term is usually used in an archaic sense or as a slightly humorous term.”
I had to look that one up, my dad used the term to refer to boys/young men that overstepped their boundaries, acting as though they knew everything. Older people saying someone was just a whippersnapper in the 1960s was a way of telling them they were too young or inexperienced to butt in.