[HN Gopher] On the disappearing antonyms of "grumpy" words
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On the disappearing antonyms of "grumpy" words
Author : signor_bosco
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-08-01 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| salamanderman wrote:
| I like that some of them entered the language as negatives.
| empressplay wrote:
| Gruntled started out referring to pigs, in particular the little
| grunting noises they made when they were content. Later when it
| was applied to people it came to mean discontent, because people
| don't generally grumble when they are happy. So the modern return
| to 'content' is actually sympatico with its original meaning
| uniqueid wrote:
| To gruntle meant making little grunty complaining sounds all the
| time
| Moosdijk wrote:
| If the author is reading this: the dark pattern in having to go
| through a lot of trouble to reject tracking cookies steered me
| away from readinf the article.
| codeflo wrote:
| I think a lot of that is because English borrowed (stole) lots of
| single words from other languages, but almost never the entire
| system of prefixes and suffixes that the word was part of.
| Languages that were more closed to foreign vocabulary, like
| French and German, are a lot more regular in this regard.
| retrac wrote:
| True, though many of the examples in the article, are from Old
| English using English derivations. Rue, ruth, ruthful,
| ruthless. The middle two have been so long forgotten Firefox
| gave them red squiggles. We rarely use some of the Old English
| suffixes and prefixes productively, retained mostly in fixed
| forms. Core Anglo-Saxon roots had a large space of valid, or
| possibly valid, words: wield, unwield, a-wield, wielder,
| unwieldy, wieldy, wieldingful, wieldingless, wieldingfulness,
| wieldinglessness, wieldinghood, unwieldinghood, a-wieldingful,
| a-wieldinglessness, and so on.
|
| The Old English equivalent of unwieldinghood would be something
| like, the condition of being unarmed or unable to control
| something, and I bet it had the same emasculating subtext it
| implies to my modern English mind. Perhaps not and maybe it
| would come to mean something like demilitarization, if we had
| kept it. Either way, we do not know as it is a long dead
| language without the abundance of sources like with Latin to
| cast light on the finest shades of meaning. 'Wieldingfulness'
| would be a noun meaning an abundance of wielding, close to but
| distinct from strength, perhaps implying confidence, and
| something one hopes the army has. Or maybe the Supreme Court's
| judges would have wieldingfulness; we still wield the law today
| and it could have come to mean mental adroitness and intensity,
| as to wield was also about will, not just physically grasping.
| 'A-wieldinglessness' might be incompetency at taking up arms,
| or holding a leadership position, or responding to a challenge,
| and perhaps suggests... slow on the draw, clumsy, flailing
| about? I think. Who knows? They are not real words after all;
| though they could have been.
| retrac wrote:
| Some of them -- like peccable - are probably truly dead. But
| others, at least to me, seem obvious when pointed out. If I ran
| into "scrutable" or "wieldly" in a sensible context, I'm not sure
| I would realize they were archaic. A personal favourite
| "tractable" is still current but already seems to be fading away.
| Far more things remain intractable.
|
| I have sometimes written a word, and then stared at it, and been
| unable to say whether I had invented it on the spot as a
| (hopefully) obvious form using regular patterns, or if I had seen
| it before and dredged it up. And maybe there is overlap there.
| Recollection is recreation in memory, and the irregular patterns
| beckon sometimes.
|
| We see this elsewhere, besides adjectives. English has not used
| the strong conjugations of Old English in a thousand years for
| new verbs, generally. We retain hundreds of semi-irregular verbs
| from that. Sing, sang, sung. Sink, sank, sunk, sunken. Think,
| thought. Drag, drug, druggen/drawn. Some of these may not be
| current in your dialect anymore. I say dragged.
|
| What's fun is when new verbs are invented, or when old verbs
| morph into new forms. "To sneak" is an old verb which was
| regularized in Middle English along with the rest. Sneak,
| sneaked. For about ~500 years things could only have sneaked.
| Then in the late 19th century in America we start hearing "snuck"
| as the past tense. That's now standard in my dialect and is
| creeping back into UK English, even. It's irresistible sometimes.
| "Thunk" was once the past form of to "to think" in some dialects.
| It is gone from nearly all for centuries now. That doesn't stop
| me from saying it once in a while for some reason; it just seems
| natural.
| randycupertino wrote:
| > To sneak" is an old verb which was regularized in Middle
| English along with the rest. Sneak, sneaked. For about ~500
| years things could only have sneaked. Then in the late 19th
| century in America we start hearing "snuck" as the past tense.
| That's now standard in my dialect and is creeping back into UK
| English, even. It's irresistible sometimes.
|
| Have you seen the Conan vs Jennifer Garner chestnut on this
| very debate: https://youtu.be/DTLU06IlPVo?t=190
| tshaddox wrote:
| "Tractable" is quite common in computer science, often to refer
| to problems which can be solved in polynomial time, as in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobham%27s_thesis
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Yeah I was confused by this inclusion for sure
| [deleted]
| Wistar wrote:
| "High torque, tractable power." Or similar is still seen in
| vehicle reviews and the like.
| [deleted]
| cortesoft wrote:
| Kempt is also still used fairly regularly (even though my iPad
| seems to think it is not a real word)... usually used as 'well
| kempt', like a "well kempt yard"
| mc32 wrote:
| I'd like to see more of ruthful.
| paul_f wrote:
| I use and see tractable all the time. However, the context is
| often "that's not tractable"
| dogorman wrote:
| This article would be much better if it had some data and
| evidence. A quick check on google ngrams reveals that the phrase
| 'well kempt' surged in popularity after 2000, relative to the two
| previous centuries. 'Unkempt' is still far more popular, but
| 'kempt' has by no means disappeared.
| duskwuff wrote:
| On the other hand: "kempt" primarily survives as the fixed
| phrase "well kempt", and hasn't retained its original meaning
| as the past tense of "to comb".
| ourmandave wrote:
| There's always been six - Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey,
| and Doc.
|
| Oh, you said _antonyms._ I thought you said CantRememberyms.
| yissp wrote:
| That's it mister, I am disgruntled. And up until now, I was
| relatively gruntled. (Simpsons S16E11)
| arooaroo wrote:
| Reminds me of Flight of the Conchords' Hurt Feeling song in which
| they are trying to portray themselves as rappers:
|
| "Some people think rappers are invincible. We're vincable."
|
| https://youtu.be/EuJzSTNDUGI
| FabHK wrote:
| There's also _How I met my Wife_ published in the New Yorker
| 1994, which starts with
|
| > 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.
|
| http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/a-matter-of-antics/
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