the grisly

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Fri Sep 14 07:03:40 UTC 2012


Heard in one of the Inspector Lewis episodes: "Let's go down to the pub.
I'll give you the grisly." The context makes it perfectly obvious that
the implication is "grisly details"--or, in other words, the "run-down".
I suppose, it could just be truncation, but I smell a nouning, of sorts.
For obvious reasons, it's not one that's easy to google up.

BTW the OED entry on "grisly" leaves a lot to be desired--it's outdated
and inaccurate. Collocations "grisly murder(s)" and "grisly details"
that are quite common today (300K and 111K raw, respectively) don't even
appear anywhere on the page.

     VS-)

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