ILLUSTRATION BY JON HAN

Everybody grumbles—it’s a basic human behavior. Still, it sometimes seems as though everybody’s doing it more. Last week, I spent the day keeping track of my social interactions, asking myself what percentage included grumbling. The answer was nearly a hundred per cent. I had grumbled; my friends had grumbled; if I’d overheard a phone conversation on the street, it had involved grumbling. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think. Maybe, if we had a keen vision and feeling for all that grumbling, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we’d die of that roar which lies on the other side of positivity and contentment.

Given its omnipresence, it’s tempting to say that grumbling may be the quintessential modern speech act. But, at the same time, it’s hard to talk about. In theorizing about grumbling, you run the risk of producing, yourself, a merely inferior grumble. That’s why I’m going to approach the subject of grumbling through a series of little observations, “Notes on Camp”-style. Susan Sontag dedicated “Notes on Camp” to camp’s patron saint, Oscar Wilde. These far humbler notes are dedicated to that great grumbler Oscar the Grouch.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary_—_and grumblers, of course, will note that far too much cultural criticism begins with the O.E.D.—the word “grumble” derives, in part, from the French verb grommeler, to mutter to oneself. But grommeler also applies to animals: it means murmuring, snuffling, growling between your teeth. There’s something animalistic about grumbling. It differs from arguing, which is disembodied, rational, and Enlightened. Grumbling is bodily: in the eighteenth century, you could describe yourself as “grumblous”—full of grumbles—in roughly the same way you might describe yourself as “bilious.” In the nineteenth century, you could have “the grumbles.” (Bonus fact: in the late sixteen-hundreds, members of England’s Court Party lampooned their enemies, the Country Party, by calling them “Grumbletonians.”)