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I had to look up what curmudgeonliness means, Wiktionary was extremely helpful: curmudgeonliness: The state or condition of being curmudgeonly. okay, let's lo
by andix 11mo ago
I had to look up what curmudgeonliness means, Wiktionary was extremely helpful:
curmudgeonliness: The state or condition of being curmudgeonly.
okay, let's look up curmudgeonly:
curmudgeonly: Characteristic of a curmudgeon; churlish
nearly there:
curmudgeon: An ill-tempered person full of stubborn ideas or opinions, often an older man.
- dmoy 11mo agoYea English be like that sometimes Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
- andix 11mo agoI meant the remarks about wiktionary in a sarcastic way. Explaining the word’s meaning twice by itself was a bit funny. Especially as it’s not a very common word a lot of non-native speakers need to look up. Probably also a few native speakers.
- mhink 11mo agoFor what it's worth, the first two steps in your lookup would come naturally to a native speaker- it's a suffix formation similar to e.g. "cleanliness" and "friendliness". "Curmudgeon" itself is interesting, because while it's not particularly common, I actually think a lot of native English speakers would recognize it because it's got a lot of character- for some reason, the way it feels to say and the way it sounds almost has some of the character of the meaning.
- 8bitsrule 11mo agoI looked it up in Merriam, it said origin, unknown. HOWEVER: cur, from the 13th-century, can mean: 'a surly or cowardly fellow'. THEN: dudgeon , from the 15th, can mean 'a fit or state of indignation'. Why so often an older man? Need we look farther than Dickens' Scrooge?