WEBVTT - If You Can Be Disgruntled, Can You Be Gruntled? 0:00:01.800 --> 0:00:06.800 Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey 0:00:06.880 --> 0:00:11.520 brain Stuff, Lauren vog Obam here, It's possibly crossed your 0:00:11.520 --> 0:00:15.360 mind at some point when you've heard a word like say, disgruntled, 0:00:15.960 --> 0:00:18.720 you might have asked yourself, has anyone ever been just 0:00:19.079 --> 0:00:23.720 grunt old? Is it possible for one to gruntle? Words 0:00:23.840 --> 0:00:26.520 like this, which are only used in the negative and 0:00:26.640 --> 0:00:31.280 not the positive, are sometimes informally called lonely negatives or 0:00:31.560 --> 0:00:37.000 unpaired words. They're common words like incessant, disheveled, and ineffable. 0:00:37.520 --> 0:00:40.320 There are plenty of them in modern English. But are 0:00:40.320 --> 0:00:44.320 they lonely because they've lost a former positive mate or 0:00:44.479 --> 0:00:48.040 are they merely solitary words doing an adequate job on 0:00:48.080 --> 0:00:52.920 their own without meeting an opposite to prop them up. First, 0:00:53.159 --> 0:00:56.800 let's look at what makes these words negative. Linguistically speaking, 0:00:58.240 --> 0:01:00.920 before the article this episode is based on How Stuff Works, 0:01:00.960 --> 0:01:04.240 spoke with Dr Jenny Letterer, an associate professor of linguistics 0:01:04.240 --> 0:01:08.320 at San Francisco State University. She explained that many words 0:01:08.319 --> 0:01:13.440 in English are multi morphemic, multi meaning many and morpheme 0:01:13.640 --> 0:01:17.839 meaning a linguistic unit. So an example of a multi 0:01:17.840 --> 0:01:22.240 morphemic word is a plural like cats. You add the 0:01:22.240 --> 0:01:26.720 plural morpheme s to the singular noun morpheme cat to 0:01:26.840 --> 0:01:30.920 mean more than one singular cat. Another type of multi 0:01:30.959 --> 0:01:34.920 morphemic word is a negative created by adding a negative 0:01:34.959 --> 0:01:38.800 prefix morpheme such as un to an adjective morpheme such 0:01:38.840 --> 0:01:44.280 as happy to get its opposite unhappy. Both of these, 0:01:44.480 --> 0:01:47.760 the plural s and the negative un, are what's called 0:01:47.920 --> 0:01:52.360 derivational morphemes. Adding them to a root word like cat 0:01:52.600 --> 0:01:56.360 or happy changes the meaning of the root or derives 0:01:56.400 --> 0:01:59.480 a new meaning. We form new words this way all 0:01:59.520 --> 0:02:02.840 the time. Say you searched for something on the internet 0:02:02.920 --> 0:02:04.760 and you want to look up the same thing again. 0:02:05.320 --> 0:02:08.200 It's easy enough in English to add the prefix red, 0:02:08.480 --> 0:02:11.600 which means again, to the verb google, which is a 0:02:11.680 --> 0:02:14.960 Newish word in itself. So you can say you're going 0:02:15.000 --> 0:02:18.160 to re google something and the person you're talking to 0:02:18.240 --> 0:02:21.959 would understand, even if they've never heard that exact word before. 0:02:23.680 --> 0:02:26.840 Let Over said, we're in a hyper accelerated period of 0:02:26.840 --> 0:02:31.240 word creation. Even our spelling is changing. She noted that 0:02:31.280 --> 0:02:35.240 other languages have even more derivational morphologies than English, with 0:02:35.280 --> 0:02:37.919 more ways to change the meanings of words. By adding 0:02:37.960 --> 0:02:43.560 multiple prefixes and suffixes to the root word. Okay, but 0:02:43.680 --> 0:02:47.160 back to lonely negatives. And now that we know how 0:02:47.160 --> 0:02:49.360 these words are formed, we can look at how we 0:02:49.400 --> 0:02:52.720 got them. Many of these lonely negatives came to English 0:02:52.800 --> 0:02:57.680 through French via Latin. Take a word like ineffable, which 0:02:57.760 --> 0:03:03.160 describes something that's indescribable or beyond understanding, something too vast 0:03:03.320 --> 0:03:07.280 to be put into words or understood. It was directly 0:03:07.320 --> 0:03:10.720 borrowed into English from French in the Middle Ages. It 0:03:10.840 --> 0:03:14.200 was the exact same word, no changes in spelling. French 0:03:14.240 --> 0:03:18.280 acquired it from the Latin word nabilis, which meant unutterable. 0:03:20.200 --> 0:03:22.560 The first known use of this word in English was 0:03:22.639 --> 0:03:26.560 in fifteen forty, in the phrase Oh God of high pity, 0:03:26.840 --> 0:03:31.320 immense and ineffable. It arrived in English complete with the 0:03:31.320 --> 0:03:35.280 prefix and the negative meaning. Letter says that words like 0:03:35.320 --> 0:03:38.880 this come into the language quote already glued into place, 0:03:39.160 --> 0:03:41.960 and there's no incentive to take off the negative prefix. 0:03:43.120 --> 0:03:45.320 In other words, it filled a hole in the English 0:03:45.400 --> 0:03:48.240 language as it was, and we didn't need affable as 0:03:48.280 --> 0:03:52.440 its opposite, not that people didn't try. The first known 0:03:52.520 --> 0:03:55.560 use of effable was in sixteen sixty eight, so more 0:03:55.600 --> 0:03:58.520 than two hundred years after ineffable had already been in use. 0:03:59.200 --> 0:04:01.360 In the United States, ineffable had a bit of a 0:04:01.360 --> 0:04:04.920 heyday in the eighteen seventies, but effable never really caught on. 0:04:06.360 --> 0:04:09.720 Letterer explained the positive could have dropped out because there 0:04:09.720 --> 0:04:15.120 were much more frequent synonyms in use, meaning basically, we 0:04:15.240 --> 0:04:18.560 have lots of ways to describe something that's describable. What 0:04:18.680 --> 0:04:21.040 we didn't have was a word for something too big 0:04:21.080 --> 0:04:23.680 for words, and the French had a word ready for 0:04:23.720 --> 0:04:28.720 the borrowing. Not only do we invent new words thanks 0:04:28.760 --> 0:04:31.920 to morphemes, but we also change the meanings of words 0:04:31.920 --> 0:04:36.040 over time. This is called semantic drift, and it's led 0:04:36.040 --> 0:04:40.200 to some of these lonely negatives not having positives. This 0:04:40.279 --> 0:04:43.479 is the case for a word like disheveled, which means 0:04:43.560 --> 0:04:47.320 being in a state of disorder or disarray. It too, 0:04:47.360 --> 0:04:50.559 comes to English from French, where the negative prefix discs 0:04:50.760 --> 0:04:55.040 was added to chivul, which meant hair. For a long 0:04:55.120 --> 0:04:58.119 time it did refer just to the state of one's 0:04:58.160 --> 0:05:02.160 hair or hat. In fourteen o five, Jeffrey Chaucer wrote 0:05:02.160 --> 0:05:04.880 about a man who was disheveled save for his cap. 0:05:05.240 --> 0:05:10.679 Riding bare headed, having unbound hair and only a cap 0:05:10.800 --> 0:05:14.400 rather than a proper hat was very casual in Chaucer's day, 0:05:14.839 --> 0:05:18.680 the equivalent of wearing your pajamas on an airplane. In 0:05:18.720 --> 0:05:21.400 the six hundred years since he wrote The Canterbury Tales, 0:05:21.760 --> 0:05:24.520 the word has drifted away from its original English meaning 0:05:24.760 --> 0:05:27.320 and can now refer to a person's whole state, not 0:05:27.520 --> 0:05:31.240 just their head. Messy clothes, makeup, or hair. Any of 0:05:31.279 --> 0:05:35.560 it adds up to being disheveled today, but there's no 0:05:35.920 --> 0:05:40.320 disheveled or heviled. Originally, that would have just meant having 0:05:40.600 --> 0:05:44.520 orderly hair. English didn't need that word like it apparently 0:05:44.680 --> 0:05:50.240 needed disheveled. Larier said, so many new objects and activities 0:05:50.320 --> 0:05:52.880 come into our lives as culture evolves, we have to 0:05:52.920 --> 0:05:56.760 have new words. They're often based on old words, using compounds, 0:05:56.839 --> 0:06:00.840 blends or derivations. Without them would be talked like Shakespeare. 0:06:02.560 --> 0:06:05.640 Let's bring this back around to our earlier question, is 0:06:05.680 --> 0:06:09.279 it possible to be gruntled? The answer is not really. 0:06:10.400 --> 0:06:13.800 A disgruntle was first used in eighteen sixty two. A 0:06:13.920 --> 0:06:17.560 gruntle comes from Middle English, the now grunt, meaning the 0:06:17.760 --> 0:06:22.800 snorty sound combined with the diminutive morphine. Put it together 0:06:22.960 --> 0:06:26.160 and you get basically little grunting sound. And that's what 0:06:26.200 --> 0:06:28.560 gruntle meant when it was first used as early as 0:06:28.600 --> 0:06:32.159 fourteen hundred, but usually when writing about pigs or people 0:06:32.279 --> 0:06:37.400 sounding like pigs. It wasn't until fIF that gruntle was 0:06:37.480 --> 0:06:41.080 used as a verb to mean to complain. Then in 0:06:41.960 --> 0:06:47.599 two disgruntled pops up, meaning ill humored or disgusted. So 0:06:47.800 --> 0:06:50.960 it's not the opposite of anything, and it didn't really 0:06:50.960 --> 0:06:55.240 take off in popularity until the twenty first century. If 0:06:55.279 --> 0:06:57.560 you're interested in learning more about the usage of words 0:06:57.600 --> 0:06:59.760 in the United States, check out the corpus of his 0:07:00.000 --> 0:07:04.120 Oracle American English. This database can provide the frequency and 0:07:04.160 --> 0:07:07.120 context of just about any word, broken down by decade. 0:07:07.680 --> 0:07:12.840 Other unpaired words you might want to investigate include debunk, reckless, disgusted, 0:07:13.120 --> 0:07:21.880 and indelible. Today's episode is based on the article disheveled 0:07:21.920 --> 0:07:25.280 disgruntled Why are some words only used in negative form? 0:07:25.360 --> 0:07:28.040 On how stuff works dot Com? Written by Kristen Hall Geisler. 0:07:28.480 --> 0:07:30.760 Brainstuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with 0:07:30.760 --> 0:07:33.080 how stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang. 0:07:33.680 --> 0:07:36.280 Four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeart 0:07:36.320 --> 0:07:38.960 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your 0:07:38.960 --> 0:07:39.680 favorite shows.