Be full of gorm, not gormless, about saving positive opposites, says Countdown star

MANY English words have lost their positive opposites, Susie Dent has bemoaned as she says native speakers tend to “dwell on the bad”.

The lexicographer and etymologist said that British people tended to be a rather downbeat group who focused on the “sad and seamy side” of life. This explained why our dictionaries contain an inordinate amount of insults and other pejoratives.

To redress the balance, Ms Dent – the 56-year-old adjudicator for the letters rounds and resident of the “Dictionary Corner” on Channel 4’s long-running game show Countdown – said that she would like to see the “positive” counterparts of certain words given greater prominence.

Appearing at the Cheltenham Literature Festival to promote her new book, Word Perfect, she told the audience: “The words I would love to bring back are the positive counterparts of the negatives that we tend to love or at least hold on to.

“So the lost positives of words like disgruntled, or unkempt or uncouth or unruly, because we could be ‘kempt’, we could be ‘ruly’, ‘gruntled’ or full of ‘gorm’.

“‘Gorm’ comes from a Viking word meaning ‘to take heed’, so if you are gormless, you are just not paying attention to anything. But if you are full of gorm, you are very careful.”

Ms Dent said that she was fighting to ensure these words are given their due prominence in the 21st century. “I often

‘If you are gormless, you are not paying attention – but if you are full of gorm, you are very careful’

say I am feeling very combo-bulated just to test the waters,” she revealed.

“It was PG Wodehouse, that lover of wordplay, who decided you could be gruntled, you could be pleased and contented.

“Disgruntled came first in this case, but for the most part the positives came first. So if you were kempt – it came from a German word meaning ‘combed’ – it meant well turned-out.

“You could be ‘couth’ – polite – and if you were ‘ruly’ you stuck to the rules.

“And you could be ruth; full of ruth. A lovely word meaning compassion. We just say ruthless.

“You can be ‘reckful’, ‘feckful’ but we only remember reckless and feckless, so it is definitely saying something about our national characteristic.”

The lexicographer, who has appeared on Countdown since 1992, was also asked whether she would want to see a governing body introduced in Britain to adjudicate which words should enter our vocabulary.

Such a system exists in France where the Académie Française founded in 1634, serves as the nation’s official authority on the use of its language

But Ms Dent quickly shut down the idea. “If we try to simplify our spelling, or if we try and stamp down on all these sorts of changes, I think we will lose a lot of colour in the history of English,” she said.

“So no, I don’t want a sort of Académie Française. It doesn’t work. It famously tried to stem the tide of English words going into French and it never works.”