Grockles

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Jared, who lives near York, England, but is originally from Sheboygan County, Wisconsin.

Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. How did you get all the way over to, where did you say York?

Yeah.

Wow.

It was a long, strange trip, let me tell you.

What are you calling us about?

I subscribed to one of these listservs, one of these kind of groups on the Internet. Somebody sent a message to the group saying that they had been out wandering around over the weekend going somewhere, and they had to fight their way back through the grockles.

Through the grockles.

I thought, well, gosh, I haven’t heard that one before. After eight years of living here, it was a brand new word. So I thought, well, I’ll Google that, as you tend to do these days. And I’ve determined pretty quickly that Grokkel meant tourist or outsider or somebody who was only temporarily in the area kind of clogging up the roads as it were.

So I checked with the rest of the people in the group and they said, oh yeah, that’s right, that’s generally the way we take it. And I said, well, where does that come from? And of course that’s when the real discussion began. Because everybody said, oh, well, it’s originally Cornish. Oh, no, no, no, somebody else said it comes from a different area of the country altogether.

And the real question isn’t so much of how it’s used or what it means now, but where does the word come from? Because there just didn’t seem to be any clear consensus about that. And, you know, after about a day or so discussing it on this list, sir, we all kind of just gave up. And I said, well, you know what? I’m going to talk to the experts.

But let me just ask you first, how are you spelling Grockle?

G-R-O-C-K-L-E is the way it was relayed to me.

So it’s not like a muggle. It’s not like something from Harry Potter then.

No, no. In fact, one of the people on the list said that they had heard it when they were a child, so that would have been in the 60s or 70s. So, I mean, I think I can pretty securely date it for at least 30 or 40 years back.

Yes, exactly right. There are a number of different places online that you can actually find a fairly accurate etymological history of this. One of the most accurate places, though, was Michael Quinian’s newsletter that he sent out quite some time ago, probably in the year 2000. I don’t know if that original version is still online, but he quoted correspondence that he had with editors at the OED.

And to make a long kind of fabulously interesting etymological story short, it comes from the 1964 movie The System, which starred Oliver Reeve. They were shooting in Devonshire, I believe, and they picked up the term from some locals. And the locals claimed that they learned the word from a fellow at a local swimming pool who was working there for the summer and thought that one of the old ladies looked like a dragon-like creature that was in a cartoon called Danny and his Grockle.

Oh, my gosh.

It’s spicy to say that that is the best history that’s so far known out of this term. So I can see how it immediately became a derogatory term for anyone. And, you know, in certain parts of the country, as you well know, it’s flooded with tourists at given times of the year. And there’s always that love and hate relationship between a tourist destination and the people who work there and the tourists that come and give them all their money.

And so the term came to be used to apply it to the tourist, although sometimes it just means a punter in general without having to be a tourist.

A punter makes a lot of sense to me, absolutely. And York, where I live, we have a lot of tourists. And again, that love-hate relationship exists because we like the money.

Right.

I say we now because I’m sort of a native. But we like it when they go home at the end of the season.

You like the money, the grockles not so much.

Well, it is awfully hard, I must admit, when you live outside of an old medieval city, when you go in to do some shopping and the streets are just so crowded that it’s hard to get around.

Yeah, you think this is nice. We don’t have to have heavy industry to support the town, but I wish they weren’t all standing around taking pictures of themselves in front of the cathedrals.

All right.

Well, take care of yourself, and thanks for calling today.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you want to discuss, though, British English or Canadian English or American English or anything else, by all means, give us a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org. And as you just heard, we do welcome calls from anywhere in the world.