If You Can Be Disgruntled, Can You Be Gruntled?

Some words like 'disgruntled' and 'ineffable' -- informally called lonely negatives -- don't have a positive counterpart in English. Learn how a few of them came to be in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/lonely-negative.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren vog Obam here, It's possibly crossed your
mind at some point when you've heard a word like say, disgruntled,
you might have asked yourself, has anyone ever been just
grunt old? Is it possible for one to gruntle? Words

(00:23):
like this, which are only used in the negative and
not the positive, are sometimes informally called lonely negatives or
unpaired words. They're common words like incessant, disheveled, and ineffable.
There are plenty of them in modern English. But are
they lonely because they've lost a former positive mate or

(00:44):
are they merely solitary words doing an adequate job on
their own without meeting an opposite to prop them up. First,
let's look at what makes these words negative. Linguistically speaking,
before the article this episode is based on How Stuff Works,
spoke with Dr Jenny Letterer, an associate professor of linguistics
at San Francisco State University. She explained that many words

(01:08):
in English are multi morphemic, multi meaning many and morpheme
meaning a linguistic unit. So an example of a multi
morphemic word is a plural like cats. You add the
plural morpheme s to the singular noun morpheme cat to
mean more than one singular cat. Another type of multi

(01:30):
morphemic word is a negative created by adding a negative
prefix morpheme such as un to an adjective morpheme such
as happy to get its opposite unhappy. Both of these,
the plural s and the negative un, are what's called
derivational morphemes. Adding them to a root word like cat

(01:52):
or happy changes the meaning of the root or derives
a new meaning. We form new words this way all
the time. Say you searched for something on the internet
and you want to look up the same thing again.
It's easy enough in English to add the prefix red,
which means again, to the verb google, which is a
Newish word in itself. So you can say you're going

(02:15):
to re google something and the person you're talking to
would understand, even if they've never heard that exact word before.
Let Over said, we're in a hyper accelerated period of
word creation. Even our spelling is changing. She noted that
other languages have even more derivational morphologies than English, with

(02:35):
more ways to change the meanings of words. By adding
multiple prefixes and suffixes to the root word. Okay, but
back to lonely negatives. And now that we know how
these words are formed, we can look at how we
got them. Many of these lonely negatives came to English
through French via Latin. Take a word like ineffable, which

(02:57):
describes something that's indescribable or beyond understanding, something too vast
to be put into words or understood. It was directly
borrowed into English from French in the Middle Ages. It
was the exact same word, no changes in spelling. French
acquired it from the Latin word nabilis, which meant unutterable.

(03:20):
The first known use of this word in English was
in fifteen forty, in the phrase Oh God of high pity,
immense and ineffable. It arrived in English complete with the
prefix and the negative meaning. Letter says that words like
this come into the language quote already glued into place,
and there's no incentive to take off the negative prefix.

(03:43):
In other words, it filled a hole in the English
language as it was, and we didn't need affable as
its opposite, not that people didn't try. The first known
use of effable was in sixteen sixty eight, so more
than two hundred years after ineffable had already been in use.
In the United States, ineffable had a bit of a
heyday in the eighteen seventies, but effable never really caught on.

(04:06):
Letterer explained the positive could have dropped out because there
were much more frequent synonyms in use, meaning basically, we
have lots of ways to describe something that's describable. What
we didn't have was a word for something too big
for words, and the French had a word ready for
the borrowing. Not only do we invent new words thanks

(04:28):
to morphemes, but we also change the meanings of words
over time. This is called semantic drift, and it's led
to some of these lonely negatives not having positives. This
is the case for a word like disheveled, which means
being in a state of disorder or disarray. It too,
comes to English from French, where the negative prefix discs

(04:50):
was added to chivul, which meant hair. For a long
time it did refer just to the state of one's
hair or hat. In fourteen o five, Jeffrey Chaucer wrote
about a man who was disheveled save for his cap.
Riding bare headed, having unbound hair and only a cap

(05:10):
rather than a proper hat was very casual in Chaucer's day,
the equivalent of wearing your pajamas on an airplane. In
the six hundred years since he wrote The Canterbury Tales,
the word has drifted away from its original English meaning
and can now refer to a person's whole state, not
just their head. Messy clothes, makeup, or hair. Any of

(05:31):
it adds up to being disheveled today, but there's no
disheveled or heviled. Originally, that would have just meant having
orderly hair. English didn't need that word like it apparently
needed disheveled. Larier said, so many new objects and activities
come into our lives as culture evolves, we have to

(05:52):
have new words. They're often based on old words, using compounds,
blends or derivations. Without them would be talked like Shakespeare.
Let's bring this back around to our earlier question, is
it possible to be gruntled? The answer is not really.
A disgruntle was first used in eighteen sixty two. A

(06:13):
gruntle comes from Middle English, the now grunt, meaning the
snorty sound combined with the diminutive morphine. Put it together
and you get basically little grunting sound. And that's what
gruntle meant when it was first used as early as
fourteen hundred, but usually when writing about pigs or people
sounding like pigs. It wasn't until fIF that gruntle was

(06:37):
used as a verb to mean to complain. Then in
two disgruntled pops up, meaning ill humored or disgusted. So
it's not the opposite of anything, and it didn't really
take off in popularity until the twenty first century. If
you're interested in learning more about the usage of words

(06:57):
in the United States, check out the corpus of his
Oracle American English. This database can provide the frequency and
context of just about any word, broken down by decade.
Other unpaired words you might want to investigate include debunk, reckless, disgusted,
and indelible. Today's episode is based on the article disheveled

(07:21):
disgruntled Why are some words only used in negative form?
On how stuff works dot Com? Written by Kristen Hall Geisler.
Brainstuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with
how stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang.
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