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Make Your Point > Archived Issues > GULL & GULLIBLE

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pronounce these words:

Pronounce "gull" as "GULL." Hear it.

Pronounce "gullible" as "GULL uh bull." Hear it.


connect these words to others:

I'll tell you how I first met the word gullible, even though it makes me cringe.

Back in grade school, a classmate asked me, "Did you know that the word gullible is written on the ceiling?" I looked up to see, which prompted them to laugh at me and say "You're so gullible!"

And then I did the same thing to some other kid.

It was so childish! Kids trying to gull each other, using a word as a weapon. 

As an adult, I'm very much against weaponizing words, and very much for sharing them and exploring them for fun.

When you think about the words gull ("to trick") and gullible ("easily tricked"), you might wonder if they have anything to do with gulls, the sea birds: the ones that'll eat up whatever you toss them. We're not actually sure if there's a link there; it's possible, but not well documented, that the verb "to gull" was influenced by the name of the bird, since gulling people is a figurative kind of tossing them something (a lie) and watching them swallow it (believe it).

Speaking of those who swallow lies, see if you can come up with this other synonym of gullible, deceivable, trusting, and unsuspecting: From the Latin credere, "to believe," credu____ people are willing to believe what they're told, even if they're being lied to.

(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)  

definitions:

One of the oldest meanings of "gull" in English is "throat, or gullet." It also grew to mean "to swallow," and then "to mislead: to lie to someone, to cheat someone (as if making them swallow your lies)."

Today, if you're gulled by something, or if you're being gulled into doing something or believing something, you're being tricked by it, or tricked into doing or believing it.

And, someone gullible is easily tricked or easily lied to.

grammatical bits:

Parts of speech:

"Gull" is a verb, the transitive kind: "They gulled her;" "They gulled her with false promises;" "They gulled her into signing the contract."

"Gullible" is an adjective: "a gullible child," "The child was trusting and gullible."

Other forms: 

The other verb forms are "gulled" and "gulling."

People who are gullible can be referred to as "gulls," as in "They may be newbies, but they aren't gulls."

how to use them:

Pick the formal, semi-common words "gull" and "gullible" when people are fooling each other and you want to put at least some of the blame on the victims: the fools. Or, you want to emphasize how easy it was for them to get fooled.

Talk about people gulling each other, or gulling each other with certain lies or tricks or false promises, or gulling each other into accepting or doing certain things.

Or, talk about gullible people, either individually or in groups. "Even an expert in dodging scammers and fraudsters was once gullible enough to have given away his credit card number to a stranger on the phone." Here's Chris Grabenstein: "He bent all his refrigerator magnets and tried to sell them online as miracle medical bracelets to gullible senior citizens."

examples:

"Now I understand how Armpit managed to sell you those phony tickets. You are way too gullible." 
  — Louis Sachar, Small Steps, 2006

"I have an ulterior motive for wishing to contribute to Gove's scheme [to place a Bible in public schools]. People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality."
  — Richard Dawkins, The Guardian, 19 May 2012

has this page helped you understand "gull" and "gullible"?

   

Awesome, I'm glad it helped!

Thanks for letting me know!
If you have any questions about these words, please message me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.


study them:

Explain the meanings of "gull" and "gullible" without saying "trick" or "easy to trick."

try one out:

In preschool, I remember that my sister Heidi and I had this friend who swore up and down she could do magic. She claimed that she would soon be turning herself into a unicorn. Heidi was skeptical, but I was gullible. I could not WAIT to see that transformation.

Do you have a similar story about being a gullible kid? Or maybe, in your story, you were the kid who fooled the gullible ones?




before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game this month is "That's A New One!"

I'll define and describe an amusing term that Dictionary.com has recently embraced. See if you can come up with it, and if you need more hints, you can reveal them by highlighting the black bits. To see the answer, scroll all the way down. 

Try this one today:

According to Dictionary.com, it's "a decoy entry in a reference work, such as a dictionary or encyclopedia, secretly planted among the genuine entries to catch other publishers in the act of copying content," having arisen "from a fictitious entry in the fourth edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia," in which it was fictitiously and highly amusingly reported that a certain person with a whimsical last name "died on assignment while covering an explosion for the fictitious Combustibles magazine."

It entered English around the year 1975.

It's one word.

It's the invented last name of the fictitious reporter who fictitiously combusted.

It's a compound word in the pattern "description animal," but with a whimsical spelling, as in "riverferrit" or "buttmonkee."

It starts with the letter... M.

Its number of syllables is...three.

Its first three letters are... MOU.

review these words:

1. One opposite of GULLIBLE is

A. GARRULOUS: overly talkative.
B. INCREDULOUS: disbelieving, unwilling to believe.
C. METICULOUS: very careful and precise about details.

2. In Shakespeare's Sonnet 86, the speaker seems to whine about his writer's block and blame it on a rival poet who seems to be doing much better, complaining, weirdly, that a ghost "nightly gulls" his rival, meaning the ghost _____.

A. tricks or deludes the rival
B. guides or inspires the rival
C. hypes or publicizes the rival




Answers to the review questions:
1. B
2. A

From the game: mountweazel.


a final word:


I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.

I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.


From my blog:
On vocabulary...
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      How to motivate our kids to write.
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A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.

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