Posted
on July 13, 2014
Thomas
and Ruth Roy of Wellcat had heard about disgruntled workers
quitting their jobs, going on strike, even suing their employers.
And
they got to wondering, what would gruntled workers be?
And
what would gruntled workers do with a special day all to
themselves?
If
“disgruntled” means dissatisfied and discontented,
it stands to reason that “gruntled” would mean satisfied and
contented...except, actually, there isn't such a word as “gruntled”!
Well,
actually, you might find “gruntled” in a good dictionary, because
in the 1930s people who noticed that disgruntled is not part
of an antonym word pair, like satisfied and dissatisfied
are, jokingly started to use gruntled just as the Roys did, in
jest. This is called a back-formation.
(The
term “back-formation” indicates that the word formation went
backwards from disgruntled to gruntled, rather than the
usual direction of word formation, when someone tacks on an antonym
prefix like dis-.)
So,
in addition to encouraging people to celebrate Gruntled Workers Day
by being proud of our jobs (or school, family, hobby, or self) – I
also would love to encourage you to think of unpaired words – that
is, words that aren't part of an antonym pair – and to find out if
the missing antonym used to be a word.
Here's
another unpaired word to get you started:
- unruly means disorderly, out of control
- ruly means well behaved, in control – BUT it is archaic and nowadays is almost never seen or used
An
even more interesting sort of word, in my opinion, is the word that
means the same thing as what you would think would be its opposite. Here is one example:
regardless
means without regard (that is, without thinking about) the current
situation
- irregardless means …. (wait for it!) without regard (that is, without thinking about) the current situation
In
other words irregardless
means regardless!
The
truth of the matter is that irregardless
is not a “proper” word. It is considered to be non-standard. It
is a word that English speakers created, not in a joking way, like
gruntled,
but accidentally, by adding an extra (and unnecessary) antonym
prefix (ir-)
to a word that already has a proper antonym suffix (-less).
Also
on this date:
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ahead:
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