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Jun 3, 2009
This week's theme
Words having many unrelated meanings

This week's words
purlicue
trammel
grig
growler
gaff

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

grig

PRONUNCIATION:
(grig)

MEANING:
noun:
1. A cricket or grasshopper.
2. A small or young eel.
3. A lively or lighthearted person.

ETYMOLOGY:
The word is often used in the phrase "merry as a grig". The word is of uncertain origin, though various theories have been suggested, such as a corruption of "merry as a cricket" or "merry as a Greek", as in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: "Then she's a merry Greek indeed."

USAGE:
"When all is reversed and we shall be like the insane, to whom the antics of the sane seem the crazy twistings of a grig."
E.B. White; Removal; 1938.

"I walked into my local branch of Boots the Chemist as merry as a grig, with a twinkle in my eye and an annoying whistle on my lips."
The Weasel; Independent (London, UK); Jun 8, 1996.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it they are wrong. -Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)

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