Skip to main content

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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A STORY about STOREY

Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story.  I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be.  I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING.  Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out.  But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor).  A taller building could have multiple STOREYS.  Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version.  Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
2 comments
Read more

Similar but Not: Byre/Bier

Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur.  I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng).  So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings. But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead.  So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing. In German, BIER is just BEER. And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese.  I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.
Post a Comment
Read more