An Attitude of Gratitude
Part 1 - What does it mean to be thankful, to be grateful?
Wednesday 24 November 2021
Somewhere in the North Carolina Mountains
An Attitude of Gratitude
Part 1 - What does it mean to be thankful, to be grateful?
I had this notion that you had to be “grateful” for something and then, you could be thankful to the person, or the source of the thing, or the condition. This made sense to me. We have these words, grateful and thankful. I looked up the words and I studied the etymology of these words and I found out that I was wrong.
Even though these words are similar, and they are, in our modern language, considered to be synonyms, they have not always been considered to be the same thing. They started out as separate words, coming from different languages, with differences between them, and the more I studied them, the more convinced I became that we have lost something in the way we understand, use, and think about these words.
The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia was one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. The first edition was published from 1889 to 1891 by The Century Company of New York. It was published in six, eight, and ten volume versions containing over 7,000 pages.
According to the Century Dictionary we get “Thank/Thankful/Thankfulness” from the Old English, via the Proto-Germanic languages, and it meant, “to recompense, to reward, to give an immediate acknowledgment of the favor by words.” This is why we say “thank you.” It is an immediate acknowledgment..
We get “Grateful/Gratefulness/Gratitude” from the Middle French, or directly from Medieval Latin, and it meant, “to be full of thankfulness, to be disposed to repay favors bestowed,” and I think this is most important: grateful often expresses thanks and the “readiness to manifest thankfulness by acts, even a long time after the rendering of the favor.”
Thanks is given immediately or soon after with words. It is an immediate, short, direct, response to a favor.
Gratefulness is an enduring response, fulfilled by actions, often long after the gift or favor. I suggest that the proper attitude of gratitude is to "Remember to Remember" over time and respond with continuing action.
Up Next, Part 2 - Why are we so unhappy?
Notes:
grateful (adj.)
1550s, "pleasing to the mind," also "full of gratitude, disposed to repay favors bestowed," from obsolete adjective grate "agreeable, pleasant," from Latin gratus "pleasing" (from suffixed form of PIE root *gwere- (2) "to favor"). "A most unusual formation" [Weekley]. A rare, irregular case of English using -ful to make an adjective from an adjective (the only other one I can find is direful "characterized by or fraught with something dreadful," 1580s). Related: Gratefully (1540s); gratefulness.
Grateful often expresses the feeling and the readiness to manifest the feeling by acts, even a long time after the rendering of the favor; thankful refers rather to the immediate acknowledgment of the favor by words. [Century Dictionary]
thankful (adj.)
Old English þancful "satisfied, grateful," also "thoughtful, ingenious, clever;" see thank + -ful. Related: Thankfully; thankfulness. Thankfully in the sense "thankful to say" is attested by 1966, but deplored by purists (compare hopefully). [Century Dictionary]