Negative Prefixes – Be Gruntled

         

Pictured: The saddest-looking, distraught baby, who has become disgruntled over his mangos.

Listen to (or read) this neat bit on the etymology of some common words with negative prefixes.  Most of us are familiar with the construction of adding prefixes like dis- to the beginning of words like “agree” to make the root word negative.  That is “agree” becomes “disagree”, meaning to not agree.

But what about words like “disgruntled”?  Or “disheveled”? The apparent root of the word is not a free-standing word, like in the case of “agree”.  Although the article doesn’t nerd out this far, generally these root “words” are considered to be bound morphemes.  The development of these words is logical, despite the fact that we don’t really “gruntle” or “shevel”.

In addition to the words mentioned in the article, some words following this concept that came to my mind were:

-          Inept

Latin ineptus

In- = not

Ept = Latin aptus, or “apt” (like as also used in “aptitude”)

-          Ruthless

reuthe "pity, compassion" (see ruth) + -less

What other words crossed your mind as “disturbing”?

#AnitaVP #linguistics #nerd #disgruntled 

No babies were harmed in the writing of this post or in the eating of mangos.