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Today, however, I awoke uncharacteristically grateful and I would be distinctly ungrateful if I ignored the feeling. I'm not given to displays of random emotion, but I can't shunt aside the contented feeling warming me up on this cold Kansas morning. I'm grateful for my life and my home and my love with Mrs. ProfessorRoush. Grateful for my children, now almost grown and gone. Grateful for the donkey's and the new barn cats and my garden.
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I'm extremely grateful for the Internet this morning, ready with all the information of the world at my touch-typing fingertips, including the origin of the word grateful. ProfessorRoush's mind doesn't work in a straight line, often taking bends and u-turns through a maze of thought, and somewhere along this little piece of writing, I began wondering why we say that we are "full of grate." There is no definition of "grate" in the English language (to sound harshly, to irritate, a frame of metal bars to hold wood) that seems pleasant. Happily, a short search informed me that "grateful" derived from an obsolete meaning of grate as "pleasing", from the Latin grãtus as in gratitude, and that the first known use of "grateful" was in 1552. It seems odd that "grateful" would have survived in the English language while "grate" no longer is defined as "pleasing." It seems odd that I would even wonder about it.
But, strange as it is, I'm also grateful just to wonder about it.
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Thanks for your explanation of the word grateful. Not that it ever had entered my mind to wonder about it, but now at least I learned something new which is always good.
ReplyDeleteHappy to be of service. My curiosity ran amok.
ReplyDeleteI always suspected that your mind and mine probably worked in similar ways. I never know when a random thought will send me heading to the Internet to answer some burning question that has no significance to anyone but me.
ReplyDeleteI am grateful to read such a beautiful post!
ReplyDeleteI'm happy that it filled you with grate.
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