Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vog Obam here, It's possibly crossed your
Speaker 1: mind at some point when you've heard a word like say, disgruntled,
Speaker 1: you might have asked yourself, has anyone ever been just
Speaker 1: grunt old? Is it possible for one to gruntle? Words
Speaker 1: like this, which are only used in the negative and
Speaker 1: not the positive, are sometimes informally called lonely negatives or
Speaker 1: unpaired words. They're common words like incessant, disheveled, and ineffable.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of them in modern English. But are
Speaker 1: they lonely because they've lost a former positive mate or
Speaker 1: are they merely solitary words doing an adequate job on
Speaker 1: their own without meeting an opposite to prop them up. First,
Speaker 1: let's look at what makes these words negative. Linguistically speaking,
Speaker 1: before the article this episode is based on How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: spoke with Dr Jenny Letterer, an associate professor of linguistics
Speaker 1: at San Francisco State University. She explained that many words
Speaker 1: in English are multi morphemic, multi meaning many and morpheme
Speaker 1: meaning a linguistic unit. So an example of a multi
Speaker 1: morphemic word is a plural like cats. You add the
Speaker 1: plural morpheme s to the singular noun morpheme cat to
Speaker 1: mean more than one singular cat. Another type of multi
Speaker 1: morphemic word is a negative created by adding a negative
Speaker 1: prefix morpheme such as un to an adjective morpheme such
Speaker 1: as happy to get its opposite unhappy. Both of these,
Speaker 1: the plural s and the negative un, are what's called
Speaker 1: derivational morphemes. Adding them to a root word like cat
Speaker 1: or happy changes the meaning of the root or derives
Speaker 1: a new meaning. We form new words this way all
Speaker 1: the time. Say you searched for something on the internet
Speaker 1: and you want to look up the same thing again.
Speaker 1: It's easy enough in English to add the prefix red,
Speaker 1: which means again, to the verb google, which is a
Speaker 1: Newish word in itself. So you can say you're going
Speaker 1: to re google something and the person you're talking to
Speaker 1: would understand, even if they've never heard that exact word before.
Speaker 1: Let Over said, we're in a hyper accelerated period of
Speaker 1: word creation. Even our spelling is changing. She noted that
Speaker 1: other languages have even more derivational morphologies than English, with
Speaker 1: more ways to change the meanings of words. By adding
Speaker 1: multiple prefixes and suffixes to the root word. Okay, but
Speaker 1: back to lonely negatives. And now that we know how
Speaker 1: these words are formed, we can look at how we
Speaker 1: got them. Many of these lonely negatives came to English
Speaker 1: through French via Latin. Take a word like ineffable, which
Speaker 1: describes something that's indescribable or beyond understanding, something too vast
Speaker 1: to be put into words or understood. It was directly
Speaker 1: borrowed into English from French in the Middle Ages. It
Speaker 1: was the exact same word, no changes in spelling. French
Speaker 1: acquired it from the Latin word nabilis, which meant unutterable.
Speaker 1: The first known use of this word in English was
Speaker 1: in fifteen forty, in the phrase Oh God of high pity,
Speaker 1: immense and ineffable. It arrived in English complete with the
Speaker 1: prefix and the negative meaning. Letter says that words like
Speaker 1: this come into the language quote already glued into place,
Speaker 1: and there's no incentive to take off the negative prefix.
Speaker 1: In other words, it filled a hole in the English
Speaker 1: language as it was, and we didn't need affable as
Speaker 1: its opposite, not that people didn't try. The first known
Speaker 1: use of effable was in sixteen sixty eight, so more
Speaker 1: than two hundred years after ineffable had already been in use.
Speaker 1: In the United States, ineffable had a bit of a
Speaker 1: heyday in the eighteen seventies, but effable never really caught on.
Speaker 1: Letterer explained the positive could have dropped out because there
Speaker 1: were much more frequent synonyms in use, meaning basically, we
Speaker 1: have lots of ways to describe something that's describable. What
Speaker 1: we didn't have was a word for something too big
Speaker 1: for words, and the French had a word ready for
Speaker 1: the borrowing. Not only do we invent new words thanks
Speaker 1: to morphemes, but we also change the meanings of words
Speaker 1: over time. This is called semantic drift, and it's led
Speaker 1: to some of these lonely negatives not having positives. This
Speaker 1: is the case for a word like disheveled, which means
Speaker 1: being in a state of disorder or disarray. It too,
Speaker 1: comes to English from French, where the negative prefix discs
Speaker 1: was added to chivul, which meant hair. For a long
Speaker 1: time it did refer just to the state of one's
Speaker 1: hair or hat. In fourteen o five, Jeffrey Chaucer wrote
Speaker 1: about a man who was disheveled save for his cap.
Speaker 1: Riding bare headed, having unbound hair and only a cap
Speaker 1: rather than a proper hat was very casual in Chaucer's day,
Speaker 1: the equivalent of wearing your pajamas on an airplane. In
Speaker 1: the six hundred years since he wrote The Canterbury Tales,
Speaker 1: the word has drifted away from its original English meaning
Speaker 1: and can now refer to a person's whole state, not
Speaker 1: just their head. Messy clothes, makeup, or hair. Any of
Speaker 1: it adds up to being disheveled today, but there's no
Speaker 1: disheveled or heviled. Originally, that would have just meant having
Speaker 1: orderly hair. English didn't need that word like it apparently
Speaker 1: needed disheveled. Larier said, so many new objects and activities
Speaker 1: come into our lives as culture evolves, we have to
Speaker 1: have new words. They're often based on old words, using compounds,
Speaker 1: blends or derivations. Without them would be talked like Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: Let's bring this back around to our earlier question, is
Speaker 1: it possible to be gruntled? The answer is not really.
Speaker 1: A disgruntle was first used in eighteen sixty two. A
Speaker 1: gruntle comes from Middle English, the now grunt, meaning the
Speaker 1: snorty sound combined with the diminutive morphine. Put it together
Speaker 1: and you get basically little grunting sound. And that's what
Speaker 1: gruntle meant when it was first used as early as
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred, but usually when writing about pigs or people
Speaker 1: sounding like pigs. It wasn't until fIF that gruntle was
Speaker 1: used as a verb to mean to complain. Then in
Speaker 1: two disgruntled pops up, meaning ill humored or disgusted. So
Speaker 1: it's not the opposite of anything, and it didn't really
Speaker 1: take off in popularity until the twenty first century. If
Speaker 1: you're interested in learning more about the usage of words
Speaker 1: in the United States, check out the corpus of his
Speaker 1: Oracle American English. This database can provide the frequency and
Speaker 1: context of just about any word, broken down by decade.
Speaker 1: Other unpaired words you might want to investigate include debunk, reckless, disgusted,
Speaker 1: and indelible. Today's episode is based on the article disheveled
Speaker 1: disgruntled Why are some words only used in negative form?
Speaker 1: On how stuff works dot Com? Written by Kristen Hall Geisler.
Speaker 1: Brainstuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang.
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