language

Going Through a Phrase

by Mordechai Schiller

Gruntled, Gusted, and Graced

P
eople keep dissing the English language.
No, I don’t mean dissing in the sense of “a clipped form of
disrespect,” a slang term that “came into existence in the early
1980s and into vogue in the early 1990s” (Garner’s Modern
English Usage).
I mean adding the prefix dis-, turning words around and making them
mean their opposite.
The dissing has been going on since Middle English. (No, that doesn’t mean
sixth- to eighth-grade English; it’s the English language spoken from 1150 to
1470.) It includes words like dis-content, dis-repair, dis-like, dis-appear, dis-
able, and yes, dis-respect.
When my son Meilech was 4, we passed a construction site and he said,
“Right, it’s easy to build a house if you think?”
I said, “It’s never easy to build a house. But you always have to think. You
can’t build a house without thinking.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “If you have directions, you don’t have to think. You just
follow the directions.”
Meilech’s insight came from his finding the directions that came with a
Lego set too limiting. He followed his own creativity.
Why am I telling you this?
Words are like Lego blocks. With some thought, you can add attachments
to words and create entirely new ones. The attachments are called affixes. As

NEWSMAGAZINE 72 November 23, 2022


We hear about
Going Through A Phrase
William Safire explained, an “affix is something added to
a word at the beginning (prefix) or at the end (suffix) or
in the middle (infix, as in absobloodylutely).” He called it
Mordechai
by“linguistic Schiller
surgery.”
H.W. Fowler wrote that the prefixes de- and dis- func-
tion “to form a compound verb with the sense of undoing
the action of the simple one, and they are an invaluable
element in the language, constantly providing us with
useful new words.”
Other common prefixes that flip words around to
their opposite include un- (unfair), mis- (misunder-
stand), be- (behead), and im- (impossible).
Like power tools, affixes must be used with caution.
Fowler warned, “It is dangerously easy for a writer to
invent a new word of this kind to save himself the trou-
ble of thinking of an existing antonym. ‘At the present
rate of distortion of our language,’ it has been said, ‘it
looks as if we should soon be talking about black and
disblack, good and disgood.’”
Let’s keep in mind that words and Lego blocks are not
identical. Unlike Lego, once you connect parts to some
words, you can’t always disconnect them. They can
become fused and take on a life of their own.
Newton’s third law of motion says, “For every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction.” But, for every
dis-, is there an equal and opposite un-dis? To get nega-
tive about it, are there words starting with dis that have
a positive disposition? (For that matter, is someone
indisposed posed?)
If an employee is dismissed and then rehired, is the
employee missed?
Something gross can make you feel disgusted. Can
something pleasant make you feel gusted?
A blunder can be a disgrace. Does receiving an award
make you graced?
Jack Winter wrote a piece in The New Yorker filled
with expressions whose prefixes were de-tached:
“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. …”
We hear about “disgruntled employees” who, if dis-
gruntled enough, may become “whistle blowers.” But
can there be gruntled employees? Well, it’s not so sim-
ple. OED cited a 1938 comic novel by P. G. Wodehouse,
in which he described a character: “He spoke with a cer-
tain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not
actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
OED defined gruntled as an adjective, a back-forma-
tion from disgruntled, meaning “pleased, satisfied, con-
tented.” But, before you get too gruntled, check out this
apparent contradiction. OED listed two definitions for
the verb gruntle:
1. To utter a little or low grunt. Said of swine, occa-
29
11 Tishrei
Cheshvan5783
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language
“disgruntled
employees.”
But can there be
gruntled employees?
sionally of other animals; rarely of persons.
2. To grumble, murmur, complain.
So, if gruntle means to grumble, what do disgrun-
tled people have to grumble about? William Safire
wrote: “You might think that if the old gruntle meant
‘complain,’ then disgruntle would mean ‘to stop from
complaining,’ but language is not always logical.”
Gruntle comes from grunt. As Safire explained,
grunts “are the short, deep, guttural sounds made
by hogs, especially when eating. The word seeks to
imitate the sound” [onomatopoeia]. Adding the -tle
ending turns the word into “what lexicographers
call a frequentive, a verb that describes repeated or
recurrent action.”
(OED called it a “frequentative,” but Safire
insisted that people who say frequentative “need
preventive, not preventative, medicine.” I’m just a
lexikibitzer, I don’t take sides.)
Safire said, “The frequentive of wrest is wrestle; of
prate, prattle; of spark, sparkle; and the frequentive
of grunt is gruntle.”
The British lexicographer Susie Dent wrote in
The Guardian about our natural inclination to neg-
ativity. Is she positive about that? She has “made it
a mission to highlight a category of English that lin-
guists fondly call ‘orphaned negatives.’ These are the
words that inexplicably lost their mojo at some point
in the past, becoming a sorry crew of adjectives that
includes unkempt, unruly, disgruntled, unwieldy,
and inept.”
To my ears, the term “orphaned negatives” is
insensitive to real orphans. But if we’re going to be
offensive, let’s go whole hog:
Henry VIII would have had the negatives
beheaded. n
Please send smiles, sticks and stones to
language@hamodia.com.
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