Curmudgeon, Cantankerous and Churlish: Grouchy Words

Around since the 1700s, this meaty word almost sounds like its meaning. All those hard consonant sounds are perfect for a word describing a blunt personality with no soft edges. A cantankerous person is grumpy and grouchy and full of bile they’re not afraid to spew if you bug them, which isn’t hard to do.

Curmudgeons tend to gripe about other people’s manners, but they aren’t known for having such great manners themselves. You can call rude people churlish.

Curmudgeons aren’t always contrary, and contrarians aren’t always curmudgeonly, but the Venn diagram of the two would have considerable overlap. A contrary person, as you might notice from the root contra, is someone who is always going against others. A favorite saying of the contrary is “Well, actually…”

The most famous grouch is a green Muppet who lives in a garbage can, which would make anyone grouchy. If you’re a grouch, you’re likely a curmudgeon, and definitely have some anger issues. Grouches are dismissive, crabby, negative, nitpicky, and ornery. The first known uses of this term in the late 1800s referred to grouchy statements rather than grouchy people.

Being an ingrate is different from being a curmudgeon, but neither are what you would call happy-smiley-jolly sorts of people. This word is pretty much self-defining: an ingrate lacks gratitude. This unthankful attitude leads to all sorts of less-than-ideal behavior, such as whining, complaining, grousing, and often being a weapons-grade curmudgeon.

Do you know anyone hot-headed? Then you know someone irascible, which means quick to anger, a quality often associated with curmudgeons.

Curmudgeons are constantly saying “Bah!” and “Pah!” and “Nope!” to all sorts of things: sometimes those things involve money. When someone is particularly stingy with money, you can call them miserly, and such a person is a miser. It’s no accident that these words are close to miserable, another word that describes plenty of curmudgeons.

Speaking of old-fashioned, nay is an old word for no, as in, “Nay! Thou shalt not stealeth my golden chalice, varmint.” So a naysayer is someone constantly saying no. Naysayers are always doubting, contradicting, and discouraging. If you need a pep talk, stay away from naysayers.

First appearing in the 1600s, ornery began as a variation of ordinary. That may seem like a strange path, but ordinary things are sometimes dismissed as boring and mediocre, and ornery first applied to the same old, same old. From there, the term shifted from the outside world to the inner world, keeping the contempt as a common denominator.

This is another word that can be a verb or noun: if you scold people a lot, you’re a scold. Scolding is the language of blame. You can scold your child for not eating dinner, and you can scold politicians for not keeping the government open. People generally don’t like to be scolded, since the scolder generally treats the scoldee like a child, no matter their age. Scolding is a close relative of nagging.