Grateful makes sense. A grate is something you put over a gap to stop things from falling. It is a sense of trying to hold something as it would ordinarily fall.
I think of this a lot with the names of animals. Frog is perfect, as is cheetah and grackle. Some animals are perfectly right only in the plural—wolves and mice for instance. The sharp surliness of wasp, the mellow and open-ended fuzziness of bee, and who could deny the intrinsic bugness of bug?
Fish is right when you see one cold and dead on your plate or next to a tidepool, but has nothing to say for the animals glinting and alive. Skunk is just right. Hawk is close enough, but eagle is missing something. Those things certainly are chickens, but pigeons aren't that at all. We should call them doves again. I can't disagree with quail, pheasant or duck, and plover is absolutely splendid.
With plants sometimes they do not have a real name to themselves, just a name that compares it to something else. Sometimes the scientific name feels like the true name, and sometimes I can't find any true name at all.
Tulip poplar is neither a tulip nor a poplar, but Liriodendron tulipifera seems to capture it. American sycamore's name isn't sycamore, but Platanus occidentalis is just as blatantly wrong.
Sometimes I think there should be different words for a tree and the wood that comes from it, like we have different words for cattle and beef, or pigs and pork.
The correct name for Bradford pears is Callery pear, but I can't stop calling them Bradford pears, because Bradford is much closer to the tree itself than Callery.
I like the word Kudzu. I did a univocal poem in my poetry class, which is one where you use only one vowel throughout the whole poem. It became a project that stretched well beyond the bounds of the class; I compiled huge lists of words based on the vowels they included. Do you know how few multi-syllabic words there are in English that have U as their only vowel? Murmur, susurrus, upchuck, humus, mucus, unfurl, fungus, upthrust, uncut, sunburn, cumulus, tumult, unjust, usurp, suburb, lustful, unhurt, fulcrum, dumbstruck, sulfur. My list doesn't have kudzu yet. I didn't think enough about plants back then.
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