Chapter Two: How come you can be “joyful” but not “happy-ful”?

The other day, I was going over the suffixes “-ful” and “-less” with my summer school students. “-ful,” is not difficult for them to grasp: “-ful” means, well, full of. If you are “joyful,” you are full of joy. Seems obvious. “-less” on the other hand is not so intuitive because “less” is already a word that exists. Even though I tell my students, verbatim, that “-less” means without, I’ve found over the years of teaching this particular curriculum that if I prompt them with, “‘-less’ means…” at least one or two respond with “Less of something!” As in, “I like my boba tea with less sugar.” (Not that you’d be likely to hear that sentence from one of my students. This particular example comes from my own experience of being a woman in her 30’s with a slowing metabolism. Alas.)

When you stop to think about it, it is a little confusing that “less sugar” has a very different meaning than “sugarless.” If you want to order your boba with only a little bit of sugar (“less sugar”) and instead you order it “sugarless,” you are in for a unsweet surprise.

Can we really blame English learners for being confused between, for example, “less sugar” and “sugarless”? I suspect that this distinction might be easier for a native English speaker to grasp, based solely on what “sounds right.” But how should an EL student know whether to attach the “less” to the left or right of the word it’s modifying?

One way to make this a bit less confusing is to add a hyphen before the suffix “less,” making it visually into “-less.” Great if you’re reading and writing, but you can’t hear a hyphen! When I asked my students, “What does ‘-less’ mean?” it’s not strange that they reply with the definition of the standalone word, even if the suffix version is up on the whiteboard. The two sound exactly the same.

Just as “-less” can be confusing to use properly, “-ful” doesn’t escape unscathed from grammatical battering either.

“-ful” is perhaps easier to grasp in meaning, but it’s not always easy for my students (particularly my ELs) to apply this suffix correctly. I have a few go-to examples that I always pull out to illustrate the meaning of both suffixes. Going back to “joyful,” the opposite of this is “joyless.” I use illustrations to drive home the meanings, using a picture of a smiling, joyful boy to show the meaning of “joyful” and a cartoon of a sad-looking man with a literal cloud over this head to show “joyless.”

I throw out a few more examples: “fearful”/”fearless,” “painful”/”painless,” “flavorful”/”flavorless,” etc. (For this last word, I use the image of a glass of water paired with some saltine crackers. I used to use a picture of plain rice, but I had to specify that it was plain and didn’t contain delicious salt or fat. Not the best example, when you have to explain the invisible parts that aren’t there.)

After sharing the “-ful” and “-less,” contrasting pairs, I ask students to shout out their own examples. A few days ago, when covering this lesson, a 7th grader proudly offered, “Happy-ful!” (Or should that be “happiful”?) I had to pause and say, “Um… no… that’s not a word…” But my sentence drifted off, as I was suddenly lost in thought. Why isn’t happy-ful a word? Why shouldn’t it be? Its meaning is clear, after all. If anything, it shows the student’s ability to make new word forms using the building blocks of English, which is downright impressive! So why doesn’t it work?

It would have been easy enough to shut down the example and tell the student, “Nope, try again,” but I do attempt to explain the reasons behind things when I can. If I can.

My first response was, “I think it’s because ‘joy’ is a noun and ‘happy’ is an adjective.” This seems to track: “fear,” “pain,” and “flavor” are also nouns. Is this the reason why “happy” – a description rather than a thing – can’t be turned into “happy-ful” – another description? Later that day, a student doing the same lesson proposed “sad-ful” as an example, a rather neat contrast to the first student’s suggestion of “happy-ful.” Being somewhat more prepared this time I informed the student that “sad-ful” doesn’t work because “sad” is an adjective. It felt like the right explanation. Was it?

My understanding of these suffixes is very much based on what “sounds right” to me. I grew up speaking English, with English-speaking parents and grandparents, in the United States. If I were a language-fish, swimming around and communicating, American English would be the linguistic water I’m immersed in, if you’ll forgive a somewhat tortured metaphor. And it’s famously difficult to examine the thing that surrounds you when you’re wholly immersed in it.

Although I am learning the logic of English spelling, grammar, and etymology through being a literacy teacher, there is still a lot I don’t understand. I’m oblivious to certain aspect of English because I’m teaching something that’s second nature to me.

If anyone out there can explain to me why you can be “joyful” but not “happy-ful,” I’d surely be grateful for the explanation!