Can you believe that the word grump didn’t exist before the 1700s? I mean, if you think life today sucks (and a quick glance at social media suggests most people do), imagine living with no running water, no flushing toilets, horse poo everywhere, and human poo in the spaces that horse poo has overlooked. If anyone in history had the right to be grumpy, it was surely those who lived - and I use the word loosely - before the word was available to them.
When grump first appeared, it referred not to a certain kind of person but to ill-humour itself. By the early 1800s, an ill-humoured person might be referred to as having the grumps, and it wasn’t till around 1900 that grump could refer to the person themselves.
No one is quite sure where the word came from. Like the stranger in a Clint Eastwood western, it just rode into town one day - possibly from Danish, which has grum, meaning “cruel” - but just as possibly from somewhere on the high plains where it had been drifting for who knows how long, eyes narrowed against the sun, dirty poncho slung across its shoulders, a cheroot dangling from its unsmiling mouth.
I find myself more and more in need of the word these days. I’m not sure if that’s a function of age - of which I possess more than I remember requesting - or of the world really becoming a shittier place than it used to be, or of my stupid habit of getting hooked by half-arsed posts on social media from people who think research equals repeating everything they hear from a single, unqualified source who is even angrier than they are.
It’s a beautifully apt word for what it’s describing, and that may be thanks to sound symbolism, or what Wikipedia calls “the perceptual similarity between speech sounds and concept meanings”. It’s thought some psychological whim-whammery has particular sounds evoke specific connotations for most of us. For example, many words beginning with sn-, such as snore, sneeze and sniff, are related to the less endearing operations of the outer parts of your respiratory system. Words designating softness often begin with a soft bilabial consonant (m, p and b in English), while those designating hardness are more likely to start with a hard sound. If you’re sceptical about this, here’s a wee experiment designed by psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. One of the two shapes below is bouba and the other is kiki. Which do you suppose is which?
95 to 98% of people choose bouba for the rounder shape and kiki for the angular one. And that settles that, if you ask me.
What about grump, then? It’s a cousin to other bad-tempered, complainy words like grouch, grinch, grumble, growl, gripe, grizzle and grouse. You can’t tell me that gr- doesn’t suggest something curmudgeonly to most English speakers.
Little word chunks linked with sound symbolism are called phonaesthemes, and there are linguists who find them fascinating to the point of silliness. The danger, as linguist Ben Zimmer points out, is that “this kind of ‘clustering’ is very often in the eye of the beholder.” Like mathematician John Nash in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, if you look hard enough, you can see patterns in damn near anything, and it seems that some linguists have been looking very hard indeed.
Which is where I must confess I haven’t been able to find any scholarly evidence for my view that gr- suggests bad-tempered complaininess. So maybe you can tell me I’m mistaken, although in my defence the number of phonaesthemes that get serious scholarly attention is fairly large.
That doesn’t mean every linguist buys into the theory of sound symbolism. In the words of one detractor, it may be that “the first connection is arbitrary, but later words can be derived from or influenced by it.” In that case, clusters will form, but not because a particular sound has any inherent quality, but because, like the bell that got Pavlov’s dogs salivating, it just happened to be the one that was settled on the first time a word was used for that concept.
One group of people who have more reason than most to be grumpy are those sharing the last name Grump. According to ancestry.com, in 1840 only one Grump family existed in the whole of the United States. While only modestly fertile, this was a family that knew how to persist. Today, says forebears.io, the name is borne by 38 US citizens. Interestingly, they seem to prefer the outer edges of the continent, with none living in the central block of states delineated by Montana, Minnesota, New Mexico and Mississippi at its corners. I’m sure an overly fevered, phonaesthematically inclined linguist could find some significance in that.
I can’t sign off on this week’s newsletter without sharing one last tidbit with you. In Scotland, grumphie is a generic name for a pig. One explanation for its existence is that it’s drawn from the grumph sound pigs make. Another, more common one, is that it’s a variant of grumpy.
I prefer the second explanation, myself. It has the great virtue of providing yet another reason to be loudly pissed off about something that is not only trivial but doesn’t concern me. If that isn’t a great way to keep the mood of the times alive and well, I don’t know what is.
Bits and specious
The word phonaestheme was coined in 1930 by English linguist John Firth. Born in 1890, his many claims to fame included developing a crash course in Japanese military vocabulary for RAF personnel in WWII so they could warn of impending bombing raids from intercepted enemy radio conversations.
In a recent newsletter on accents I noted a study that suggested the Texan accent was losing ground. Tony Brenton-Rule, a Kiwi who’s lived on and off in Texas since 1985, writes: “I think the Texas accent has continued as strong and strident as ever, especially in rural areas and small towns, but for the recent invasion of incomers from California and northern US states and Hispanic peoples from the south, mostly to large cities.”
Clint Eastwood did not, in fact, wear a poncho in “High Plains Drifter”; he did that in the “Man With No Name” trilogy, made up of “A Fistful of Dollars”, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. Great as his early movies were, however, nothing else he’s done touches “Unforgiven”.
“Deserves got nothin’ to do with it.” So says “Unforgiven’s” William Munny just before he shoots Sheriff Bill Daggett in one of the greatest lines in movie history.
Quote of the week
If ye’re proud to be a grumphie clap yer trotters!
Alastair D. McIver, Glasgow Fairytale