grotty

[Jonathon Green]

I very much doubt that Ringo would have used _grody_ in the 1960s, though
his heavy Liverpudlian accent might well have distorted the double-'t into a
'd'. And despite the NDAS, the 'o' in _grotty_ was/is always short. Further
to my mention of the novelisation of 'Hard Day's Night', I note a writer on
the net who suggests that it was not until HDN that the word was known at
all:

http://www.uta.fi/FAST/BIE/BI2/beatles.html

And when exploring on the mere word-level of the film, one particular word
mustn't be forgotten - the word grotty. This word actually came into public
use from the film, just like the word fab came into general usage with the
Beatles, who were constantly being referred to as the Fab Four (fab = short
for fabulous)
The word grotty is a short form of the word grotesque, and many people still
believe that Alun Owen [the scriptwriter] actually invented the word, but he
denies this and claims that "Liverpool invented the word". According to
Owen, there was some famous character in Liverpool called "Grotty G.", who
was called that because she seemed grotesque to other people. And since
"everything gets abbreviated in Liverpool", as Owen put it, the word
grotesque simply turned into the word grotty.

BTW: For those who want to check the original pronunciation there is a .wav
at

http://www.angelfire.com/mi/geha3/wavs.html - click on 'It's dead grotty.'


Jonathon Green