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“Gruntle” was used in an audiobook I borrowed from the library recently, an engaging novel by Neil Gaiman titled “Anansi Boys,” based on the ancient folktales from Africa. The Brer Rabbit stories, and many others, date back to ancient African tales about a trickster spider god named Anansi.

Gaiman’s book includes an angry character described as being “far from gruntled.” Devotees of P.G. Wodehouse, the twentieth century’s greatest English-language humorist, recognize this as Gaiman’s tribute to the author of “Code of the Woosters” from 1938, in which the narrator states “I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”

It drives my wife nuts that some people, like me, will cheerfully use “gruntle” in Scrabble. The little 1,500-page dictionary we use to settle these misunderstandings may not include it, but gruntle’s there in the final arbiter of our language, the 21,730-page Oxford English Dictionary. Its oldest recorded use was as a verb in 1400, meaning “To utter a little low grunt. Said of swine … rarely of persons.”

By 1589 it had evolved into “To grumble, murmur, complain; hence ‘gruntler’, a grumbler.” The OED said Wodehouse’s usage is a participial adjective that means “pleased, satisfied,” and it’s “disgruntled’s” back formation, or “word that is formed from what appears to be its derivative.”

“Gruntler” is a useful expression during this gloomy summer that’s left the state’s general population unusually moist, cranky and irritable, especially the peony farmers. Two years ago, the Society of American Florists newsletter had a piece titled “Alaska: Peony Capital?” that said “Peonies could be the first major international agricultural export for the state of Alaska” because “Alaska has peonies blooming when no one else does — during the summer.”

This summer brought an invasion by small spiders that use peony blooms to suspend their egg sacks, covering them with heavy webs that stunt blooming. Researchers are just beginning to determine what’s going on and resolving it.

Forty thousand spider species have been identified, and doubtlessly many more are awaiting discovery. Bug scientists’ findings can be rather dry reading unless told by an amusing and passionate author, like my favorite nature writer, John Crompton.

That’s actually the pseudonym of John Battersby Crompton Lamburn, a British civil servant in Africa and China in the early 1900s who retired to England to write about insects that intrigued him, like many other amateur naturalists. What sets him apart is his avuncularly anthropomorphic style.

In “The Hunting Wasp,” for example, Crompton tells how he lost his eyelashes and toenails to ravenous Sudanese cockroaches while sleeping, and “World of the Spider” includes an account of getting lost for a week in lion country with only four bullets. Here’s his description of a spitting spider, Scytodes, stalking a fly.  “When some little distance from a fly, the spider’s slow movements come to a stop. The fly, pretending to clean its face, has an ironic eye directed on the approaching form. It has met them before in the gradually nearing human hand, and elsewhere. It is looking now for a sudden dart and is ready for it; indeed hoping for it. Conceited to a degree, flies welcome any opportunity to display their dodging powers.”

Crompton then describes in some detail the remarkable accuracy of tobacco-juice spitters in Devonshire, England.

“Such an expert spitter, though more so, is Scytodes. So the fly, waiting with ostentatious nonchalance, merely feels something light fall on him, and after that finds himself in the middle of a downpour of sticky rain. Scytodes is spitting gum at him. … The artful dodger will dodge no more. He has met someone more artful than himself. Scytodes strolls wearily to him and puts him to death.”  Spiders may be scary, but how could librarians not admire creatures with “book lungs”? According to www.earthlife.net/chelicerata/s-anatomy.html, book lungs are just behind the legs and “consist of an atrium or space into which numerous layers of membrane-bound tissue extend,” like pages in a book.

Only lesser evolved spiders have book lungs, however, with newer, sleeker models having trachea. All have tiny brains and big appetites, though.

As the Danish proverb puts it, “Young pigs grunt as old pigs grunted before them.”

Greg Hill is director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries.