A few years ago while reading Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines I came across a particular quote that made me think about words: “And yet, when I look at her, lying crumpled in front of me, her white thinning hair matted with her invalid’s sweat, my heart fills with love for her — love and that other thing, which is not pity but something else, something the English language knows only in its absence — ruth — a tenderness which is not merely pity and not only love...”.
Ghosh is referring to the fact that our language contains the word ‘ruthless’ (it’s a word one hears used quite a lot) but lacks its opposite, ‘ruth’. I’d never thought about it before, but Ghosh’s words made me realise how many English words are negatives without positives.
Another famous literary example of this phenomenon appears in PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters: “I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled”.
I came across this Wodehouse quote again recently in another book, E Lockhart’s wonderful The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. In
addition to being hilarious, feminist and educational (in what other book for teenage girls would you find a description of Bentham’s Panopticon?), the book introduces a new linguistic concept, that of the ‘neglected positive’. This, according to Frankie, the narrator of the book, is the positive form of a word that usually exists in the negative sense: prefixed with an ‘un’ or ‘in’, ‘im’, ‘dis’ or ‘non’ (or in the case of ‘ruthless’, suffixed with ‘less’). Some of these positive forms are real words that are rarely used. Others, like ‘gruntled’, don’t exist but should.
Some neglected positives that Frankie uses in the book are ‘maculate’ (the opposite of immaculate), this word means morally tainted, ‘petuous’ (from ‘impetuous’), meaning careful, ‘turbed’ (from ‘disturbed’), meaning relaxed and comfortable, and (my favourite) ‘ept’, the opposite of ‘inept’. In some cases, such as ‘pugn’ and ‘criminate’, the neglected positive should actually have the same meaning as its negative form, but Frankie (and Lockhart) choose awesomeness over pedantry and so do I. In fact, one of the many warning signs about another character in the book is his inability to appreciate the word ‘gruntled’, as he resorts to the dictionary to prove that Frankie is wrong.
Negative words are important because all words are important, and because we need to be able to speak of negative things. I have nothing against ‘insufferable’, ‘impugn’ or ‘ruthless’: these are good words and useful ones. But I can’t help thinking that maybe if we talked more of ‘ruth’ and eptitude and gruntledness that we would be encouraging these concepts to exist in the world in greater quantities.
Perhaps we could ‘parage’ (not disparage) people more if we had the words to do so. We could spend more time telling people we love how utterly sufferable we find them and they could do the same for us. And we’d all spend a lot more time feeling turbed.
— bluelullaby@gmail.com