A gruntled Rat in a cartoon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pearls Before Swine cartoon by Stephen Pastis for November 10, 2025 has the following dialogue:

 

Pig: Hey, Rat. How you doing today?

 

Rat: I’m pretty gruntled.

 

Pig: What’s that?

 

Rat: It’s the opposite of ‘disgruntled.’ It means ‘happy. Contented.’

 

Pig: Why doesn’t anyone ever use the word?

 

Rat: Because we’re also so busy being @#@&#*@ disgruntled.

 

Pig: I’m gonna start being gruntled.

 

Rat: Good luck.

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gruntled as an adjective meaning in good humor: happy, contented. And it also has another web page about Uncommon Opposites. Turb is an archaic word. Here are twenty dis-words and their root words:

 

Dis-Word            Root Word  

 

disadvantaged   advantaged

disaffected         affected

disallowed          allowed

disappointed      appointed

discerned            cerned

discontented      contented

discovered          covered

disgraced            graced

disgruntled         gruntled

disheartened     heartened

disinfected         infected

dispensed           pensed

displaced            placed

disposed             posed

dissolved            solved

distanced           tanced

distinguished     tinguished

distorted            torted

distressed          stressed

disturbed           turbed

 

Back on June 9, 2013 I blogged about Playing with words like kids and had another version of the graphic shown above.