Rex Stout was prolific--he claimed it took between 35 and 41 days to write a novel, as long as he wasn't drinking. He wrote 33 novels and I won't get into the number of stories. His best-known as the creator of Nero Wolfe--the genius detective with the too too solid flesh.
"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat."
I won't pretend to have read more than about a dozen of his books so far, but these are three of my favorites so far:
Would you like to be gruntled? On the face of it, probably not. It doesn't sound like much fun.
But we know for sure that no one likes to be disgruntled.
So what's our option?
It turns out, "gruntle" is a very old English word (1682) that means to grumble or complain. But "disgruntled," rather than the opposite, means even more gruntled, a real complainy-face, and probably comes from an Old English word meaning "grunt.".
Because the English language has no actual rules.
"Gruntled" went out of style for a few centuries, till it was revived by some nameless writer (according to Merriam-Webster) back in the Twenties to mean, humorously, very pleased indeed.
(I'm betting it was Damon Runyon or Ogden Nash, although I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of Dorothy Parker.)
Our gruntled suspects
Anyway, supposedly the word spread like wildfire and is now used to mean "pleased", even without tongue planted in cheek.
I've never heard or seen it used at all, but I guess I'll give Merriam-Webster the benefit of the doubt.
(No, I won't.)
After further research, the OED's first citation is this, from 1938:
"He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."
P. G. Wodehouse, TheCode of Woosters
Since I've read the novel in question (and thoroughly enjoyed it), I guess I have seen it used.
As to whether Wodehouse was the originator or copped it from one of my three suspects, OED is silent. I shall now follow their example.
This is why I so enjoy going down the rabbit hole of research.
In my work in progress, one of my characters, Lawrence, third footman, started out as a Welshman with a lilting voice, in his mid-20s.
A problem arose. I had set my story in Sussex, England in the year 1917. England was in the middle of WW1. And draft age was between 18--41. So why wasn't Lawrence off in the trenches?
(I had to raise and lower the ages of several other male characters.) I chose asthma. That was one of the few ailments that would keep him out of the war. So much for the lilt. But I could work with the short breath and wheezing of an asthmatic. He's an excitable boy, prone to conspiracy theories.
But then I thought: how did people treat asthma in 1917, well before modern inhalers? I researched, and found an answer: CIGARETTES.
Yes, cigarettes. Proust used them for his asthma, as a matter of fact. From a letter to his mother: "Yesterday after I wrote to you I had an attack of asthma and incessant running at the nose, which obliged me to walk all doubled up and light anti-asthma cigarettes at every tobacconist’s I passed, etc. And what’s worse, I haven’t been able to go to bed till midnight, after endless fumigations, and it’s three or four hours after a real summer attack, an unheard of thing for me."
But these were not nicotine delivery devices. They were medicine delivery instruments, mainly stramonium cigarettes. Datura stramonium (also known as jimsonweed), a type of flower akin to deadly nightshade, has anti-spasmodic properties and relaxes the air passages.
One brand which first came on the market in the 1880's (and remained there until the 1950s) was Page's Inhaler Cigarettes:
“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”—Othello
I’ve been feeling my bones lately. No, not as in “I can feel my achy old bones,” but literally, beneath the skin. It’s partly because I’ve lost a great deal of weight this past year, due to the good offices of GLP-1 and long daily walks. (It’s also because, as we age, our skin loses collagen, literally becomes thinner. Yes, old folks really are “thin-skinned.” Don’t mess with us.)
And it feels … strange. I don’t remember my bones being right beneath the skin, in such intimate contact. Specifically, I’ve been feeling my rib cage. I’ve come to think of it as a cage—not metaphorically, but literally. It’s a cage that holds the heart and lungs not only for protection, but as a prison, the beating and the breath. Think about that for a minute. Your heart is actually in a cage, like a wild animal, pacing back and forth, unable to roam free. Think of the mighty breaths we could take if our lungs were not knocking against the breastbone! Metaphor is destiny.
What about the mind?
I’ve never bought into the ghost in the machine theory. The mind is not separate from the body, like an air traffic controller directing traffic from the tower. Duality is a myth meant for little kids. Every part of the body is essential. I am my body.
The brain doesn’t sit on a throne, signing executive orders. It goes out to visit every cell in the body through its neural network, like the caliph Harun al-Rashid in The Thousaand and One Nights, going out among his people under cover of the night.
Or, more aptly, the body is a democracy. Every part of the body is in communication with every other part through the exercise of bioelectricity, electrical potentials and currents generated by every living cell. The brain only makes these messages conscious, clothing them in words. When Walt Whitman sang the body electric, he knew what he was talking about.
As Michael Pollan puts it in A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, “the brain exists to keep the body alive.” It’s servant, not king. Trust your gut. Follow your heart. Vote with your feet. These aren’t just sayings. They’re directions.
The brain is literally reformed, rewired with every experience. You’ve got a contractor working in your head who never finishes the job.
So I should mention that I have a new (self-published) short story available now on Amazon as an ebook.
Ta da!
"Dr. Watson discovers a problem in The Final Problem, and unveils the real murderer of Sherlock Holmes."
It's 99¢, which is highway robbery for a 19-page story, but I'm still test-driving KDP and they wouldn't allow me to price it any cheaper.
Eventually I'll probably be able to price it at a nickel-ninety-five, but for now, if you'd like to fill my coffers and read a fun little story that pits Dr. Watson against Arthur Conan Doyle, now's your chance.
