Gruntled

By Fred Shivvin

A meme on social media about gruntled being the long-lost opposite of disgrunted caused me to stop scrolling. Really? Haha emoji.

I googled it for a while. Heaps of hits resulted - even t-shirts and gruntled websites. The re-discovery of this word seems to have made a lot of people gruntled and amused.

Part of the humour lies in the way the unearthing of gruntled seemed to right a wrong, an unknown sense of something lacking, providing something that should have been there but was not. 

Where had the opposite of disgruntled been all this time?

We humans like a dichotomy - they make the world easier to understand. A dichotomy is when two things are clearly opposed to each other, so they naturally come in pairs of opposites: black or white, day or night, busy or idle, man or woman, clean or dirty. So maybe even gruntled or disgruntled. Things can only be on one side of the dichotomy.

Dichotomies are the simplest way that humans categorise things and experiences. Even when unaware of it, humans categorise things all the time. (Well, maybe not when in a meditative or transcendent or extreme anxiety state, but ALL the time we are interacting with people and things.)  Clean vs dirty washing, friendly vs unfriendly neighbour, broken vs intact cup, yummy vs yucky food, easy vs hard work, interesting vs boring articles on blogs.

In the task of categorising and interacting with the world, dichotomies* are efficient. Efficiency in assessing and categorising things as either 'threat' or 'safe' (our primal dichotomy) was an important thing for early humans' survival.  So, it's hard-wired into our thinking. 

And they are fun - I like to play with them with my TATKOPs. And the meme that read 'Don't worry, be gruntled', that I just had to sing to the Bob Marley tune when I read it.

The fundamental concept underlying the dichotomy is positive/negative - the positive state (safe) and the negative state (threat). Positive and negative are of course only from the perspective of the human doing the categorising! 

In primary school, we learned our negative prefixes: un- de-, dis-, mis, a-, non-, in- (or il-, im-, ir- depending on first letter of the word) and suffix -less. And these work pretty well to create the negative form of a word. It's the most common way we negate adjectives: happy/unhappy, organised/disorganised, compliant/noncompliant, achromatic/chromatic, tolerant/intolerant (or illiterate, immaterial, irregular). So using the negative prefix gives us dichotomised pairs of words that mean the opposite of each other. Simple! Efficient! 

When the negative prefix implies a positive word exists, but there isn't one - what happened? We know the word disgruntled, so what happened to gruntled?

In reality, author and humourist PG Wodehouse made it up in 1938 in this quote: 'I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled'. Without gruntled being a word, the meaning is immediately understood. His humour was playing on the sense of lacking in English when the negative 'dis-' version of a word did not appear to have a positive version without that prefix. 

Words like disgruntled are known as 'unpaired words' (which implies that we see the lack of a pair as a negative thing itself!) 

What Wodehouse did with gruntled is known as a 'back-formation', one of the many ways English speakers create new words. By virtue of use, gruntled is now a word, although mainly for humour. That's how language works. But it was never the 'positive' partner of disgruntled….

The verb to gruntle was used in the early 15th century England, which meant 'to utter a little or low grunt' in the literal sense, but figuratively used to mean 'to murmur, to grumble'. The word disgruntle was a verb made up of 'dis', from the Latin prefix meaning 'entirely, utterly' (rather than any prefix meaning 'not'). Thus, to disgruntle meant to complain or grumble all the time. It was rare by the 19th century, and at some time the verb form disappeared from use, and only the adjective form continued.

Disgruntled continued into the current time, leaving us uncomfortable with the apparent lack of its opposite pairing. Just waiting for a back-formation! And a meme or fifty.

English has changed over time through innumerable processes, some of which lead to unpaired words. Some include the back-formation that Wodehouse used; borrowing of words from other languages, particularly Latin and French, then 'Anglifying' them; deliberate humorous misuse leading to new words; and word creation for theatre such as the mutterings of Shakespeare's mad men. Words also fall out of common usage or only one of the pair is continued. Another common change is for word to move parts of speech, like to disgruntle as a verb disappearing while the adjectival form appears.

One very interesting and deliberate process of word changed occurred in the 1500s. The English had regained control of England, and the French language was ousted as the language of governance. There followed concerted efforts to 'cleanse' English of the French forms of words. Writers considered they were correcting 'sloppy' French versions, and they turned to sources in ancient Latin by reviewing the classic writing from this period. (They sure did hate the French!).

Sometimes, the effort to be classically correct created strange words. Scholars attributed Latin roots to some words not of Latin origin. One weird example - comptroller is a bungle of controller as though it came from Latin root of computare (the verb behind computer). In fact, it came from Old French contrerelleor which is from Latin contra-rotulare (all around-control). Another example - an assumption that the Germanic word iegland (island) came from the Latin root isle put the 's' in island. 

In terms of adjectives, this process happened to disheveled, which is actually from the Old French descheveler (to disarrange the hair) with des- (apart) and chevel (hair) explaining why there is no word heveled in English.

These many common processes in language change lead to the existence of unpaired adjectives and our dismayed reaction when one of the pair seems to be missing. (Well, that might be overstating it, but I wanted to use dismayed so I could tell you it comes from the Old French desmaier, so that's why you can't have a 'mayed reaction'.)

Here's a few more words grouped according to the types of change leading to the lack of a pair.

Words borrowed by English from other languages and wrongly assumed to have Latin roots

• Aloof - from the Dutch, with a- (on) and loef (the weather side of a ship)
• Alert - from the French phrase à l'erte (on the watch)
• Disheveled - from the Old French descheveler, explained above

 Words with what looks like a negative prefix in English, but not in its source Latin

• Impetuous - with lots of sources but most likely originally from Latin impetere (to attack) with the root of the in- form before a 'p' which is im- (into, in) and petere (aim for, rush at)
• Inane - from Latin inanis (empty, void), not a negative
• Infernal - from Latin infernalis (lower, lying beneath, of the lower world) from the Latin infra (below)
• Nonplussed - from the Latin non plus (no more, no further)

One of the pair words is falling or has fallen out of common use

• Feckless - author Thomas Carlyle popularised the Scottish word feckless in his humour, but left feck (effect, value, vigour) and feckful lost in dialectical obscurity
• Indomitable - the pair domitable exists but is rare
• Intrepid - the pair word trepid exists but is rare, and survives in trepidation
• Ruthless - from reuthe (pity, compassion) while ruthful has fallen out of use
• Ungainly - from the Old Norse un- and gegn (convenient or direct); the pair word gainly exists
• Unruly - the pair ruly exists, but we don't generally talk about people as 'being amenable to rule' so much anymore (I wonder why not...)

Only the negative word borrowed or survived

• Hapless - from hap (good luck) from Old Norse
• Inept - from Latin ineptus, with the opposite form of aptus which has survived as the English word apt
• Inert - from Latin inertem, with the opposite form of artem which became art
• Insipid - from the Latin insapidus, with the opposite form of sapidus (tasty)
• Nonchalant - from the French non- and chaloir (have concern for)

Back-formation

• Disgruntled - PG Wodehouse creation, as above
• Inadvertent - a back-formation appearing in the early 1700s from inadvertance (unconscious, unintentional) from Latin in- (not) and advertere (to direct one's attention to)
• Unkempt - from Middle English kempt (to comb) was already rare by 1500; modern use is usually humour based on a back-formation from unkempt 

(Look up others  at the wonderful Etymology Online) 

As well as memes, poems and prose have played with these supposedly missing words. Here are a few:

• Gloss by David McCord, which starts: I know a little man both ept and ert.   
• The poem from The Game of Words by Williard Espy: I dreamt of a corrigible nocuous youth, Gainly, gruntled and kempt; A mayed and sidious fellow forsooth; Ordinate, effable, shevelled, ept, couth; A delible fellow I dreamt.
• How I met my wife by Jack Winter, published in the New Yorker in 1994 which starts: It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. 

It is fascinating that unpaired words create tension for English language users. It speaks to our deep and abiding need to dichotomise things in the world, including the words we use to talk about it. 

The tension so fundamental we can talk about that tension and its relief at the meme level. We find dichotomies so compelling and essential to being in the world that we can create humour with them. 

Word humour makes me quite gruntled.

*Just a word though. There is such a thing as a 'false dichotomy' - that's where our attraction to simple dichotomies leads us to make opposites from things that are not two opposing things: happy and sad, feminine and masculine, rich and poor. These things actually occur on a continuum, or a spectrum, rather than a dichotomy.  If you only look at the ends (poles) of the continuum, happy and sad might appear to be opposites, but maybe it's more accurate (and helpful) to think of the emotions as a range of movement between these 'poles'. A dichotomy can in fact be simplistic and not really represent human experience. I write more on this in Yin-yang not.