The people in charge of our words look like they don’t know the story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas or The Christmas Carol. The biggest take away from these two stories is that the Grinch is now one of the most avid celebrators of Christmas, as is Scrooge.
Their names, if they must be used as words, should mean a person (or creature) who celebrates Christmas fervently. “You scrooge so well, Brenda that you won the lighting contest for our city. I don’t know how you came up with the money for your electrical bill!” Or, “Way to grinch the charity, John, by donating so many, many toys to the needy.”
There are other words in English that can mostly get at what scrooge or grinch mean. “He’s a Christmas miser!” Or “she tries to steal the fun of Christmas!” But no we have to go to the grinch and scrooge untruths.
Perhaps we can say we mean the proto scrooge or the early grinch. Let’s try them out. “You are a proto scrooge for not getting me tons of stuff for Christmas!” Or “You early grinch for not giving to the Christmas charity that once helped you, now that you can give back!”
But proto sounds like the speaker means way back to a fetus or even a parent. And the early grinch sounds like he gets the worm. We are going to have to be even more precise.
So you might have quite the time spitting out “You dishonour Christmas with your early scrooge philosophy on life.“ Yes, that has the ring of truth about it. Or “You are as the proto grinch with your illegal anti Christmas actions.”
Finally the current Scrooge and the current Grinch will enter their proper places in our vernacular. It will be a third Christmas miracle!
OOPS! I wrote this topic last year! See the differences.
Here I was going to celebrate next post as my 10th anniversary of blogging. This dampens that a little. Live. Learn.
