Being Garrulous About "Garrulous"

This may not really make sense, but: garrulous sounds like it should mean something else.

dictionary.com defines it as "excessively talkative in a rambling, roundabout manner, esp. about trivial matters." All right. But it doesn't sound like that!

I have a sort of intuition (based on lots of reading, I guess) that I use to evaluate words. It normally works pretty well: I can guess what a word means even if I've never seen it before.

But "garrulous" trips me up. It sounds like it should mean "argumentative," or some such synonym of "hostile." Why? Probably I'm associating it with "garrison," a military outpost, and "queruluous", which means complaining.

But beyond that: the sound of the word itself suggests it. Gar-yuh-lus: the syllables lurch from one to the next ungracefully, and generally sound kind of miserable.

Compare "chatty" or "gabby": they're both short words that suggest idle, casual talk. "Longwinded," with its long "o," suggests a politician who goes on and on in a pompous way. "Babbling" sounds like a repetition of nonsense sounds, which is why it's commonly applied to babies and brooks.

But "garrulous"? Where did that come from?