Have A Good Gruntle

'You're the most ept, ert, choate and dolent person I know - how do you manage it? ' 'Excuse me...? ? ' Words are fun. If your child's school report declared him or her 'inept, inert, inchoate, and indolent' you'd have a fairly clear picture of how things are; the negatives survive, as more useful (ah, sad reflection...) and then there are the words that have reversed their meanings by some really interesting but alas never yet charted human failing: 'nice' once meant stupid and ignorant; 'silly' once meant blissful... But today I'm savouring 'disgruntled': that is, dissatisfied, and angry with it; a state not unknown to a consumer society; so are you gruntled today - satisfied and happy? but it's not quite as easy as that: if you're gruntled, then officially you're 'uttering little grunts'... would that be while DIYing somewhere back of the sink, or pigging out so fast you can hardly make time to breathe, or perhaps being, uh, sexually favoured? Words are fun especially for poets - Shakespeare made up more than anyone just like that without some egghead like Bacon (aha!) or Jonson looking over his shoulder and saying you can't say that they won't know what you mean in the low-price seats... Words are fun; give them a good shake of the kaleidoscope and they just might play nose-to-tail and make a poem though not today it seems