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how we got so GNARLY

 Some very strange words came up in a session of Word Connect this weekend.  The letters brought up an old word from deep in my brain: KNURL.  If ever there was a word that sounded like an ancient Anglo-Saxon remnant, that would be it.  Hopping over to some dictionaries, I was surprised by how many variants there are, and then remembered that it is more well known with a G instead of a K, as in GNARLY.

So, a KNURL is the same as a KNUR, which probably came from KNAR, and they all refer to the bumps on the trunk of a tree.  Not that any usage could be considered "modern", it also means that a smooth material has been specifically modified so we can get a better grip on it, so things like darts are KNURLED, or have been through the process of KNURLING.  As a verb, somewhere there is a machine or craftsman who can KNURL things. [EO] suggests it is probably derived from Middle English KNOR(-) meaning "knot", from about 1400 AD.

Over on the G side, we have GNARL (verb) meaning 1) the growling of a wild animal or 2) to twist into a deformed shape.  The first meaning goes back to Shakespeare at least, and has been largely forgotten.  Number two is pretty much the same as KNURL, as in: the GNARLS ("lumps") on a tree trunk, where GNARL comes from GNAR and is a back-formation from GNARLED.

Where it gets interesting is how GNARLY (the adjective) came to have a bunch of unrelated, slang meanings. 1) same as GNARLED, 2) bad, difficult or challenging, and the winner is number 3) "cool, excellent" which got a huge boost from "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" where the boys used big words incorrectly to try and sound intelligent, often failing most egregiously.

Wait, my memory was off a bit.  The Speak Like Bill and Ted website says that Bill only ever used gnarly to describe the "gnarly old goat dude" which is the classical, Shakespearean sense.  The current usage of gnarly, meaning "cool or excellent" is surfer speak, and its big boost was from Sean Penn's character in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982).

Surfer Today has a good explanation of how gnarly came to mean "so twisted it has become cool again".  And, ultimately, it came to mean both cool or disgusting, excellent or gross, depending on the context.

Looking at the Google Ngram Viewer for "gnarly,gnarl,gnarled,knurl" gives interesting results: using 1 point as 0.000001%, gnarled is the most widely used of these (57 points in 1900 and up to 94 points today), knurl was a bump higher (2 to 5) than the other two from 1940-1980, but after Fast Times came out in 1982, gnarly took a big upturn, now sitting at 15 points.

So, party on, dudes.  I enjoy the twists and turns (gnarls) of researching even the smallest of things in the vast sea of knowledge.

Sources: mostly [MW] Merriam-Webster Online, also [EO] Etymology Online

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