Finding mistakes and sloppiness in areas where you reasonably expect some quality control to operate can make you grouchy. Bad-tempered. Cantankerous even. And that’s exactly what happened to “cantankerous” itself.
The word seems to have come from the Middle English word “conteckour,” which meant somebody who starts quarrels. It was considered slang for a very long time. So long that wasn’t deemed suitable for inclusion in a dictionary until 1736 — and even then it was in the “Alphabet of Kenticisms,” which was a sort of an Urban Dictionary of the day. That entry was “Contancrous, peevish, perverse, prone to quarrelling.”
Then in 1773, Oliver Goldsmith wrote “She Stoops to Conquer,” and included this line: “There’s not a more bitter cantanckerous toad in all Christendom.” That’s where the trouble started. “She Stoops to Conquer” was pretty popular, and it was quoted in a number of other publications — including the line in question. But at some point the line was misprinted as “There’s not a more bitter cantanckerous ROAD in all Christendom.”
The original misprint has been traced back to “Slang and its Analogues,” by Farmer and Henley in 1891. What the misprint led to was a long-running controversy among grammarians about whether “cantankerous” could be applied to any old thing, or if it was supposed to just mean an argumentative person.
The central figure in the controversy was an author and journalist named Ivor Brown. He lived from 1891 to 1974, and was pretty prolific. He wrote over 50 books, which is a lot for one person. You can tell he had an active interest in words because starting in 1942, he wrote a series of 15 books that each included the word “word” in the title: A Word in Your Ear, Chosen Words, Words in Season, and so on (as far as I can tell they’re all out of print). At some point he noticed the “cantankerous ROAD” citation, and took up the cause for using “cantankerous” in relation to things as well as people. Even though it was originally a mistake.
Brown evidently kept at the argument for decades, and if arguing about a bit of word trivia for decades isn’t a good description of “cantankerous,” I don’t know what is. He didn’t even win the argument; inanimate objects don’t qualify as cantankerous.
