In the beginning was the word. —John 1.1
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Last Sunday I told you about my conversation with a disgruntled subscriber. One of you replied: I’d like you to know that I am a gruntled subscriber.
I didn’t know what gruntled meant and wasn’t sure that it was even a legitimate word so I expected a deprecatory line to follow. But there was none.
Gruntled?
I’m a word junky but I didn’t know gruntled. I thought it’d been made up, but no, it’s in the dictionary.
gruntled | ˈɡrən(t)ld |adjective humorous; pleased, satisfied, and contented.
I like it. It’s quirky, obscure, and unrecognizable without the prefix (dis-). Imagine seeing it for the first time in a sentence like this:
She was a gruntled old woman.
If you’d never seen or heard gruntled before, you might think: Bitter old woman. Or, wrinkly, perhaps. Or even decrepit. And no wonder. Gruntled sounds harsh, like grunt.
Disgruntled first appeared in 17th-century England. In the 20th century some wise guy dropped the prefix and created gruntled. That’s known as “back-formation.”
Words are generally unremarkable—like grains of sand on a beach. They’re there. Lots of ’em. But we don’t notice any particular grain until one pops out like a gem.
I remember the first time I heard “antidisestablishmentarianism.” That popped! A certain high school classmate had come across the longest word in the English language. We were in awe of the word and her until the school word-nerd said: It is not the longest. It’s only 28 letters long. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, he said, is longer.
(Wise guy!)
I like new words. Finding a new word for a writer is like finding a new star for an astronomer, a prehistoric burial site for an archaeologist, a new fish for an ichthyologist, a new god for a polytheist.
Most words enter your vocabulary without fanfare. But now and then a word announces itself. You caress it like a gem before putting it in your pocket.
Here are a few words that once popped for me. Please add your own in the comment window below.
Funky, bodacious, avuncular, wizened, bourgeois, eschatology (not to be confused with scatology), and, of course, EUREKA.
One more: serendipitous. I love everything about that word. Gordon Kaufman, the late renowned theologian at Harvard, used “Serendipity” for god.
Oh, and one more thing:
Don’t worry. Be gruntled.
