Curiouser and curiouser.

Dear Word Detective:  What is the “grate” that we’re supposed to be “full” of in “grateful”?  I can understand being full of care, full of hope, etc., but what is this “grate”? — Al Pratt, Tempe, AZ.

That’s a good question.  I remember as a kid wondering the same thing, and deciding that since whatever you were supposed to be “grateful” for was probably pretty “great,” there had probably simply been a spelling mistake made at some point way back when.  The alternative seemed to be that “grateful” had something to do with an actual “grate” of the sort one finds atop a barbecue.  As big a fan of hot dogs as I was at the time, that didn’t seem very likely.

On one level, the explanation for “grateful,” meaning “thankful,” is pretty simple.  First appearing in English in the 16th century, “grateful” is based on the now obsolete adjective “grate,” which meant “pleasing, agreeable” as well as “thankful.”  This “grate,” incidentally, came from the Latin word “gratus,” also meaning both “pleasing” and “thankful,” and the source of such English words as “gratitude,” “congratulations” and “gratuity.”  “Grate” was a handy little word, but it disappeared as a stand-alone adjective back in the 16th century.  So what we have in the adjective “grateful” is simply the connotation of being “full of” (or, more accurately, “characterized by”) “grate,” or thankfulness, in the same way that something “beautiful” is chock full of beauty, a “regretful” person is plagued by regrets, and so on.

On the other hand, “grateful” is a strange little word, and a true anomaly in modern English in the way it was formed.  The suffix “ful” appeared in Old English (as “full”) and was appended to nouns to create an adjective meaning “full of,” “having” or “characterized by.”  So far so good.  In the examples I gave above, “beauty” is a noun, “beautiful” an adjective, and “regret” a noun, “regretful” an adjective formed from it.   But “grate” was not a noun.  “Grate” was an adjective, which makes “grateful” an adjective formed from an adjective, which is not how things are normally done in English.  The etymologist Ernest Weekley, in fact, called “grateful” “a most unusual formation.”  There were a few other such formations in English, among them “direful” (terrible) and “fierceful” (ferocious or savage), but none are as common in English today as the ubiquitous “grateful.”

All of this is, of course, just more evidence that English (or any language) is a quirky, juryrigged patchwork, not a kit where the pieces fit neatly together, and even the most common words often have strange stories.  Why, for instance, do we always offer “thanks,” not a single “thank”?  It’s because the singular form of the noun “thank” (which comes from the same root as “think” and first appeared in English meaning simply “thought”) is now obsolete.  Why ask why?  Stuff happens.  Maybe just one “thank” was considered stingy.  But “thankful” was formed when the singular “thank,” by then meaning “favorable thought, good will,” was still alive and well.  All in all, I’m thankful we don’t say “thanksful.”

And I have always hated tie-dye.

Dear Word Detective:  Exactly what is a “rounder”?  One example of the term’s use is in a fairly obscure Grateful Dead song titled, “On The Road Again.”  Here is the line as it appears in the song:  “Went to my house the front door was locked, Went ’round to my window, but my window was locked, Jumped right back, shook my head, Big old rounder in my folding bed.  Jumped into the window, broke the glass, Never seen that little rounder run so fast.” — Alex Williams.

So it’s come to this, has it?  Decoding Grateful Dead lyrics?  That way lies madness.  Speaking as a former mid-range Dead fan (I own maybe four albums and have no plans to ever buy another), I sincerely doubt that most of their lyrics actually mean anything. Yes, I know there are people who regard “Ripple” as a deep philosophical statement, but those tend to be the same people who are really, really good at rolling their own cigarettes.  All I know is that if I never hear “Casey Jones” or “Truckin'” again, it’ll be ten years too soon.

I looked up the lyrics to “On the Road Again” and found some minor differences from those you supplied, but the gist is the same.  This is, by the way, not the same song as Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again.”  The Dead billed “On the Road Again” as a “traditional” tune, which they merely arranged.  The narrator of the song is a man who has married a “bad girl” and has discovered, quelle surprise, that her “badness” has persisted past the wedding reception.

As to what the “rounder” might be, there are a number of possibilities.  As a noun, “rounder” carries the general sense of “one who goes around,” or follows a route in some sense, as a salesman might have in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  When the term “rounder” first appeared in English in the 17th century, it meant a military officer who was assigned to “make the rounds” of guard posts at a base or camp to make sure the sentries were awake and alert (“In our modern Wars … sometime the Rounder will clap a musket-shot through a sleepy head,” 1624).  “Rounder” was used in the 19th century to mean a minister who traveled “on rounds” on Sunday, and the word was also used as a short form of “roundsman,” an indigent laborer who was sent around to work for various farmers, his wages being partly paid by the local church.  “Rounder” is also used in Britain, in the plural form “rounders,” as the name of a game similar to baseball in which a batter hits a ball and runs around the bases.

In US slang, however, a “rounder,” since the mid-19th century, has been a person, usually a man, who makes rounds of a different and less pleasant sort.  A “rounder” makes “the rounds” from bars to prisons to flophouses and back to bars again (“The regular rounders who are beginning to receive long sentences under the new drunkenness law,” 1891). The term was also used to mean an itinerant railway worker, but I suspect that the author of “On the Road Again” had the “chronic drunk and convict” sense of the word in mind.