Are those nasty little verses, called grues by Americans, gone out of fashion, I wonder? Here's a harmless one as I remember it from my youth: 'Willie peed in his oul' lad's tay; / The oul' lad died, I'm sorry to say. / His oul' wan looked extremely vexed; / "For f . . . sake, Will", she said, "What next?". ' Jack Murphy from Walkinstown in Dublin asked about them.
Grue, the verse form, is not given a mention in the great Oxford dictionary. It must be related to grue meaning to feel terror or horror; to shudder, tremble; to shrink from something; to be troubled in heart. I recently read in an American publication that the word was coined by Robert Louis Stevenson from gruesome, but this cannot be so; Stevenson was just one of the last in a long line of Scots and English writers who used the word. The word has a long pedigree. You'll find it in the 1300 Cursor Mundi; Barbour uses it in The Bruce in 1375, Holland in 1450. Coleridge has the sense "to thrill": "His every member grueing with delight." Grue is neither in Old English nor Old Norse, but it does have a Teutonic origin. Compare the Old Swedish grua, Old Danish grue. It is related to the German graven, and to the Dutch gruwen, to abhor. But who first composed a grue, that nasty little four-liner with a sting in the tail, and who gave the form its name? Can anybody tell me?
Gobbledygook is troubling Mary Kennedy from Limerick. It's a newish word, coined by an American Congressman, Maury Maverick, in 1944. He was fed up with the jargon of congressional committees, and wrote a memo, calling it Gobbledygook. Orwell defined gobbledygook by example in his humorous explication of Nelson's "England expects every man to do his duty": "England anticipates that, as regards the current emergency, personnel will face up the issues, and exercise appropriately the functions allocated to their respective occupational groups." Congressman Maverick explained he coined his word thinking of the noise turkeys make. I've heard more than one Irish government minister saying "The answer is in the negative" when they meant "No".
