gripe

Robin Hamilton robin.hamilton3 at VIRGINMEDIA.COM
Tue Oct 19 02:12:08 UTC 2010


[This is out-of-sequence -- I thought I'd already sent it.  R.]

> There's also "gi(v)es me the grue" (Makes me sick) and "gi(v)es me the
> boak"--the last one, historically bowk (and still that in Northern
> England) is usually a verb, to vomit.  "grue", I think, is the same word
> as the beginning of "gruesome".  Don't know if either of these words made
> it over here to the US.
>
> Paul Johnston

It's the Scots connection -- most of the early OED citations for:
    grue n4, "The action of GRUE v.1; shivering, shuddering; a shiver,
shudder," and
    grue v1, "1. intr. To feel terror or horror, shudder, tremble; quake; to
shrink from something; to be troubled in heart," are Scots.

(I imagine this is more fully documented in the DSL.)

Also probably for "bock" ("bowk", "bolk", "boak"), "belch, retch, vomit".
(That from _The Concise Scots Dictionary_, so again there's be fuller
documentation in the DSL.)

Robin

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