Disgruntled

To be clear, posts about word origins are just me being curious.  Don't infer anything about current mood.  Especially as I often work considerably in advance of deadline.

I am not for instance disgruntled today.  The definition of the word means "thrown into a state of sulky disaffection".

Most words that start with the prefix "dis-" reverse the meaning of what follows.  Nobody would be confused about the meaning of disenchanted, disabled, disuse and so forth.  In some cases there has been a bit of contraction going on.  Discord for instance means you are no longer harmonious, or "in accord".

But in one odd case "dis-" seems to have the opposite effect....making something not opposite but more so.

Consider the word disgruntled.  

"Dis" is from Latin albeit with murky earlier roots.  It generally means some variation of "lack of, opposite from, apart from".  Gruntle is a variation of grunt, a word still used today although it also is Latin in its origins as "grunnire".  We've run across that name fairly recently as the scientific name of the freshwater drum, sometimes known as "Grunter" for the peculiar noise they make when grasped by fishermen.

I've scoured my own vocabulary and consulted lists but have to date not found any other use of the prefix "dis-" to indicate emphasis rather than opposite.  Certainly we think of a disgruntled person as being quite unhappy.

But ah, words are like fish.  Such slippery critters and you can't always see just what they are up to.  I have on occasion found myself in company that is not, shall we say, scintillating in their conversation.  We tend to think of grunts and the possibly related word grumble as meaning a person is unhappy.  But in these less eloquent circles maybe a grunt can mean acknowledgment or agreement instead of crankiness.  If a grunt means, sort of, yes then a "disgrunt" would be the equivalent of disagree or disapprove.  Disgruntled as a synonym for disapproving is not quite the modern context but you can get there from here.