grex/ krex/ krechtz

[Jonathan Lighter]

Not in OED. Both my grandparents (who were teenagers by 1902)  occasionally used this word / grEks / to mean "to whine or complain," esp. in the phrase, "always grexing about something." It has the same negatively critical tone as "gripe" or "bitch" (which they didn't use). I omitted it from HDAS as too "colloquial," but that may have been a mistake. (Haven't checked DARE. If it's there, these cites may still be of interest.)

  It seems to be from some form of Low German, but I haven't tried to trace the etymon.

  1959 Lewis Herman & Marguerite Shalett Herman _American Dialects_  (N.Y.: Theatre Arts)261: The Pennsylvania-Dutch  Dialect...Stop Grexing!...Stop complaining!

  1961 S. J. Perelman _The Rising Gorge_ (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster) 46:  I got a kind of a wounded, bleeding-hearts letter from him, grexing how selfish I was.

  1970 Matt Gattzden _Black Vendetta_ (N.Y.:  Belmont) 173: Your father didn't krechtz - I mean he didn't wail.

  1983 Lewis J. Poteet _South Shore Phrase Book_  (Hanstport, N.S.: Lancelot Press) 67: Lunenberg [Nova Scotia]. "You're always krexing about something."

  1987 Gary Gates _How to Speak Dutchified English_  I (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books) 34:  _Grex_: To complain; moan. "Ah, quit your grexing, you have a vonderful life."

  1988 Robert Steiner _Matinee_ (Boulder: Fiction Collective Two) 260: Something to krex about.

  1999 Rita Mae Brown _Six of One_ (N.Y.: Bantam) 50: "I've got no time for grexing." "You've only lost your husband. That's not the same as losing a child."

  2001  _Elitist Ennui_ (USENET: mn.politics) (Nov. 14): By week's end they were at it again. carping, crabbing, krexing and moaning, but much of the steam had gone out of the media's attack on the war effort.

  2007 _brik see us_  [http://brixius.wordpress.com/2007/04/] (Apr. 24): Julia, it seems, has other plans and begins grexing* upstairs....* You do know what “grexing” means, right? According to Aleisha, the owner of our downtown baby boutique did not. I can’t imagine—Lancaster being the epicenter of Pennsylvania Dutch culture and her owning a store where there are bound to be fussy babies—that she had not heard it before.


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