In 1938, P.G. Wodehouse wrote this in The Code of the Woosters:
He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
That joke put a word into the dictionary. It turns out gruntled is a word:
gruntled (adjective): pleased, satisfied, contented.
The etymology is the best part. The “dis” in disgruntled was never a negation; it was an intensifier stuck onto gruntle, an old word meaning to grumble. Which means English carried a word for “extremely grumpy” for four hundred years without a word for its opposite, until Wodehouse back-formed one as a gag. The language had a bug, and a humorist patched it.
My opinions on being gruntled; strongly held:
- Everyone deserves to be gruntled. Full stop. Not everyone gets there, but nobody is disqualified.
- Only you can make yourself gruntled. Not your boss, not your spouse, not your kids, not your follower count.
- You can only be gruntled if you love yourself first. I didn’t realize this until I started getting therapy and was formally diagnosed with ADHD. Self-criticism masquerades as high standards, and it compounds like debt.
- Others can amplify your happiness, or dampen it. Choose the amplifiers. Politely lose the dampeners. IOW, don’t waste your attention units on negative people.
- You cannot make someone else happy. You can amplify or dampen theirs, and you should work hard at the amplifying, but the job itself is theirs. Letting go of the idea that you can do it for someone is a kindness to you both. I spent 30 years believing I could make someone else happy. It was a fool’s errand.
- A key to gruntledness is finding work that feels like play. I wrote last week about the joy on the other side of grief: the joy I felt in 1981 teaching myself BASIC, back again forty-five years later.
Why gruntled instead of happy? Because happy is a big, demanding word. Happy sets the bar at joy and invites you to feel like a failure on the days you merely feel fine. Gruntled sets the bar at contented: pleased, satisfied, not disquieted, not annoyed, not perturbed. Gruntled is happy without the performance anxiety. It’s also funnier, and funnier matters.
I don’t take much too seriously. Life is good. Gruntled is my word.
It is one of my life missions to get people to use it instead of “happy”. So here’s the ask: use it this week, out loud, in a sentence, to someone who will look at you funny. “I’m feeling pretty gruntled today.” Watch what their face does. Then tell me about it in the comments or on X at @tigkindel.
Be gruntled. I am.