On the disappearing antonyms of “grumpy” words
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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.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Well+kept%2C+w...
It goes on to say that "a thousand years ago, couth meant 'known, familiar' and uncouth meant 'unknown, foreign, strange'...[c]outh faded out but was back-formed and born again".
Have you seen the Conan vs Jennifer Garner chestnut on this very debate: https://youtu.be/DTLU06IlPVo?t=190
"Drawn" also only really feels right for the passive voice. For using "drawn" actively, the only thing that sounds remotely right is "I drew", but that sounds super strange compared to "I dragged", I'm not even sure I would have recognized the former as a usage of the verb "drag" before thinking about all this.
Drawn/drew aren't uses of "drag" at all, but are uses of "draw" which can be a synonym for "pull" (among many other uses.)
Old English has: dragan -- ic drage, he drægþ (dragth), ic drog/droh, he drog/droh. Dragende, gedragen.
Standard Modern English has: to drag -- I drag, he drags, I dragged, you dragged. Dragging, dragged.
Variant there's also: to drag -- I drag, he drags, I drug, he drugs. Dragging, drug/drawn/druggen.
gedragen -> draggen -> draghn -> drawn
gedragen -> draggen -> dragged
gedragen -> draggen
gedragen -> draggen -> draghen -> draghéd -> draught -> draft
All the same root, branching in different directions.
Archaic or not, I think most of us would find it "out of place" or awkward. When's the last time you used scrutable or wieldy in conversation? We probably could figure out the meaning but I bet most of us would find it odd. Though if more people started using it, we'd quickly get used to it.
A sample: "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. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array."
> Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
“Some people think rappers are invincible. We’re vincable.”
> 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.
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.
To gruntle meant making little grunty complaining sounds all the timeOh, you said antonyms. I thought you said CantRememberyms.