Words without opposites
Jim Elliot | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 16 years, 11 months AGO
Noon every other Monday is the deadline for me to deliver this column to those newspapers which have the sense—good or bad, I can’t say—to print it. This Thursday is Christmas, but there is no holiday from deadlines for the folks who put out newspapers, even weekly ones. There will be a paper published this week, and it will be on time. And I have to fulfill my obligation to send in my column because some editors may be counting on it to take up space and some readers may be counting on it to take up time.
Unfortunately, I also have to think of something to write about, which this week seems to be very hard, indeed.
I do not want to subject anybody to a Christmas column on taxes, health insurance, car insurance, politics—partisan or non-partisan, or on any of my usual dreary topics. Nobody wants to read that kind of stuff on Christmas, and I am thankful for it, because I have honestly not been able to think of anything to write about along those lines.
I’m not going to write a column on Christmas, either, because there are plenty of other people out there in weekly newspaperland who will write one and will do a better job of it than I ever could.
What I will write about is something I have found curious for a long time: why are there some words that do not have similar words with opposite meanings? For instance, the opposite of unhappy is happy, but what is the opposite of disgruntled? When a person gets over being disgruntled, they should logically become “gruntled,” but instead they must become something else because there is no such word as “gruntled.”
If you are unhappy, you can become happy; if you are unpleasant you can become pleasant; but a disgruntled person cannot become “gruntled” even if they want to. I am not so sure that this doesn’t interfere with some constitutional right or another about freedom of speech that I might have.
I’ve written before of how my thoughts wander when I’m on a tractor or on a long road trip and this is one of the things I have thought about. Something you may be thinking about right now is that Elliott needs to stop thinking and turn on the car radio once in a while to fill up the space between his ears. And, if I had a car radio that worked, I promise you I would.
Instead, I wonder why I can never find an “ept” employee to hire. I sure have had my share of inept ones. If helium is an inert gas because it doesn’t combine with other chemical doohickeys, what are the “ert” gases? If I become nonplussed when someone does something totally unexpected, why can’t I be “plussed” the rest of the time?
See what I mean? Granted, this kind of concern is not up to the level of thinking about the mysteries of life, but it is one of the imponderables of the English language. However, that said, what are the “ponderables” of the English language?
If you can disrupt a meeting, why can’t you “rupt” one, too? If you can act in a nonchalant way, why can’t you do it in a “chalant” way? You may be dismayed with the topic of this column, but you can’t be “mayed” about it even if you want to be.
Well, I guess this is just something I’ll have to learn to live with. At least I’ve found out that these words are known as “negatives without positives”, and you’ve found out that I can have deep thoughts about shallow topics, so it’s not a total waste of time. If you’re really curious about these words you can go to a site called http://www.rinkworks.com/words/negatives.shmtl and see plenty more of them. Or, you can go on a long road trip with a broken radio and conjure them up all by yourself.
Me, I’m going to get my radio fixed.
Merry Christmas.
Montana Viewpoint has been distributed to weekly newspapers throughout Montana since 1992, and may be reprinted free of charge. Jim Elliott is a State Senator from Trout Creek in his 16th year of legislative service, and is chairman of the Senate Taxation Committee.
ARTICLES BY JIM ELLIOT
Keeping the government out of Montanan's private lives a non-partisan issue
Recently the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) granted Montana an extension of time to conform to the “REAL ID” law passed by Congress in 2005. In a nutshell the REAL ID law demanded that state driver license and identification cards conform to federal requirements concerning information and data sharing as laid out by DHS. Only state issued identification documents that met DHS standards would be valid for entrance to Federal Buildings, applying for Social Security, doing business with federally licensed banks, and by Transportation Security Administration officers for boarding aircraft. In short, it created a de facto national identification card with a national data bank of private information on American citizens.
Op-ed: Deep thoughts on a tractor in Trout Creek
As I was working on one of my old tractors (it’s a Farmall 806 for the curious) I began cussing the engineers who designed it, as I have many times in the past. Why, oh why would anyone put a bolt in an almost, but not quite, inaccessible place? How do they expect people to work on this thing without becoming homicidal? Remember the cars of the 1970s that had to have the engine partially removed from the vehicle to change the sparkplugs? I know that they are well intentioned people who only want to design a machine that works well, but couldn’t they have adult supervision from a mechanic who actually has to work on them?
Flapjack flops, democracy suffers
Well, the bill that would have designated the “whole wheat huckleberry pancake” as Montana’s official flapjack has flopped. The idea for the bill arose from students at Franklin Elementary in Missoula who wanted to participate in the legislative process. They are not the first, and will not be the last, to request legislation that really doesn’t seem to fit the lofty nature of making law. Since I live in Trout Creek, the officially designated “Huckleberry Capital of Montana” – you can look it up — I was kind of partial to the little critter. Not everyone was though, and thought the Legislature had more important, pressing issues to attend to. Well, it does, but these little silly bills serve their own purpose; there is now an elementary school class that has a better working knowledge of how laws are made than do 90 percent of Montana voters. (And 80 percent of legislators according to a wise guy in Helena whose name will not be made public for his own safety.)