Q. I'm trying to find out more about the word disgruntled. You would think that its opposite would be gruntled (and mean "contented"), but as far as I can tell, gruntled only deals with sounds and has no positive connotations. How can there be a negative word without the positive of it?

A. The prefix dis- frequently is used in a rather negative sense. Dis- can mean "deprive of" (as in disenfranchise), "the opposite or absence of" (as in disaffection) or "not" (as in disagreeable). But dis- can also be a prefix that intensifies a word that already has a negative meaning. That's how it's used in disgruntle, a word meaning "to make ill-humored or discontented." Therefore, dis- means "completely" and gruntle means "to grumble." Roughly translated, then, disgruntle means "to grumble all the time." Gruntle derives from grunten, a Middle English word of imitative origin that is also the basis of the word grunt.

So is gruntle the opposite of disgruntle? It is, but it represents a relatively recent development. In 1926, the word gruntle, meaning "to put in a good humor," first appeared in print, and it continues to show up occasionally. Linguists call this process of subtracting a real or supposed affix from a longer word to form a new word "back-formation."

Q. For about 15 years now, I have been noticing a usage of cynical and related forms that seem to be incorrect, or at least make little or no sense to me. Until 1990 or so, it seemed like cynical meant distrustful, or having some skepticism about something or someone. Then, suddenly and ever since, a new usage has arisen. It seems that, for example, a person is cynical and does things for cynical reasons. My belief is that these people actually mean sinister and are perhaps mixing up words. How can a word mean both being distrustful and being someone or something that would be distrusted due to the consequences of his or her actions?

A. There is merit in the theory that cynical has taken on an additional meaning beyond its usual definition of "skeptical or distrustful." Here are some recent published examples demonstrating usage of the word that do not seem to fit with its current definition:

"Whatever it is, it probably wouldn't cut very much into the mountainous deficit, which Stroger initially addressed with a cynical demand that county officers make across-the-board 17 percent cuts in their budgets."
— Dennis Byrne, Chicago Tribune, 12 Feb 2007

"Conspiring with Leo's cynical wife (Jan Sterling) and the opportunistic local sheriff (Ray Teal), who's up for re-election, Tatum gets a contracting firm to drill from the top of the rocky hill to rescue the man — instead of using the much quicker method of shoring up the existing passageway inside the cave."
– Bruce Francis, Sacramento Bee, 20 July 2007

These examples appear to use cynical to describe one who manipulates another, perhaps by abusing that person's trust. While we are working to determine how long this usage has been around, here are a couple older citations that might fit:

"Their only peers are The Velvet Underground and MC5, who sound dated by comparison, but their singer, Alex Chilton, is still perhaps best known as the sixteen-year-old prodigy who fronted the late '60s white soul pop group called The Boxtops. This somewhat cynical studio package scored seven top forty hits between 1967 and 1969, and one No 1 with 'The Letter,' a marvellous slab of blue-eyed Southern soul with the haunting, repetitive hook of 'My Baby just wrote me a letter . . . .'"
– Hugo Williams, The (London) Times Literary Supplement, 10 July 1992

"Bob Dole, ever cynical, smelled blood after Whitewater and decided to play presidential politics."
– Joe Klein, Newsweek, 1 August 1994

As to how the word experienced such a shift in meaning, it's hard to say. Conflation with sinister is certainly a possibility, though the lack of evidence of sinister showing similar usage in such specific contexts makes it unlikely. More likely, people took the distrust aspect of cynical and infused it with the meaning "causing distrust," rather than "exhibiting distrust."