Mead's Online Guide to Using Insults and Escaping While Your Victim Consults a Dictionary

Certain words emerge to represent personalities that serve as fixtures in the community. Scapegoats and sin-eaters bear the guilt for everyone else's trangressions; the gossipmonger collects the tawdry activities of the neighborhood and serializes them; the voyeur enjoys the thrill of watching private moments through a windowpane.

Come to think of it, none of these are positive, are they?

Today's entry is no exception, I'm afraid: it covers one of my favorite words, "curmudgeon." A curmudgeon is defined by dictionary.com as "a bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person."

Though the origin is unknown, I'm casting my vote with Walter William Skeat (1835 - 1912), author of several tracts on the English language. He maintained that curmudgeon is a combination of the English word "cur" (a mongrel dog, especially a worthless or unfriendly one) and one of two Lowland Scottish words: "mudgeon" (grimace) or "murgeon" (to mock; to grumble).

Strangely, in modern English dictionaries "murgeon" instead refers to grimace, whereas "mudgeon" isn't listed. "Ker" is also used in a variety of words as a prefix for greater emphasis in onomateopoeic words liked "kerplunk."* I do hope Sherlock Holmes can shed some light on this mystery.

Either way, the word literally translates to "an unfriendly, grimacing/grumbling mongrel dog." Better use this one sparingly, folks.**

Literary curmudgeons include A Christmas Carol's Ebenezer Scrooge, the Harry Potter series's Severus Snape, and To Kill a Mockingbird's morphine-addicted Mrs. Dubose.
Dr. Gregory House of the namesake show has also been labeled as such.

The curmudgeon who comes to my mind is the movie Steel Magnolias's Ousier Boudreaux (as if that it's pronounced "wheezer" isn't clue enough), the laughingstock of her friends with a kinder heart than she tends to show (farthest left in picture).

As literature and movies demonstrate, people are rarely curmudgeons for the sake of being curmudgeonly. Regret, pain or disillusionment gnaws at their roots, souring their moods. But Scrooge's heart thaws when faced with his own mortality, Mrs. Dubose sends a single white camelia to the Finch children as thanks for reading to her, and Ouiser's love for children shows in the smile she gives her friend's son.***

I don't know about House, because I don't watch "House," and if you need a reason why I don't watch "House," you're staring at it.

I suppose that makes me a curmudgeon, too?

I prefer to use the term "selectively cranky."



Information purloined from dictionary.com, the Oxford University Press Blog, and The Mavens' Word of the Day; image purloined from The International Movie Database



* - such as our word's comic-book cousin, KERBLUDGEON!
** - limit usage to your ancient in-laws who never really liked you, and who run about as fast as you can walk
*** - before he bursts into tears