Had One Grunch, but the Eggplant Over There

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Roger. I’m calling from New Orleans.

We’re glad to have you, Roger. What’s up today?

My father-in-law, who has passed away, had a phrase that he always used to say that we really didn’t understand where it came from. We don’t know if he found it somewhere or if he came up with it himself.

Okay, let’s hear it.

The phrase was, he would have a list of things or someone would be talking and he would say, well, I had one gun, but the eggplant over there. He would just kind of say that to maybe just make people scratch their heads or kind of make them stop for a minute and think, what did you just say? And he’d say, well, I had one gunch, but the eggplant over there. Just a non sequitur.

Yeah, is that right? Exactly. Is that anything that you’ve heard of?

Yeah, it’s a thing. Was he the kind of guy that read Mad Magazine?

He may have, you know, as a kid. I mean, he’s not a current subscriber.

So Mad Magazine had this as like a non sequitur expression since like around 1956. But the word gunch is grunch with an R everywhere else I’ve seen this expression. But it’s exactly the same. I’ve had one grunch, so G-R-U-N-C-H, but the eggplant over there. And this is quasi grammatical, but really doesn’t make a lot of sense. But there’s a deeper story than that being used in Mad Magazine.

It comes from humorist Roger Price, who had a book called In One Head and Out the Other, published in 1951. Now, you might not know Roger Price, but he was one of the inventors of Mad Libs. You know that game where you come up with words to insert into a story, and then when you read the story, it comes out funny or nonsensical? So this guy was pretty well established. He used to write for Bob Hope’s radio show and just had a really storied career as a humorist.

But in this 1951 book, he’s talking about something he calls the avoidist movement, A-V-O-I-D-I-S-T. And so this is not a real thing. It’s something that he’s invented. But on the way to describing this, he’s talking about its main character. And this is a supposedly real relative by the name of Clayton Slope, who, as Price says, lived avoidism. And so Slope, Clayton Slope, was the kind of guy who took 11 months to be born, whose head was flat in the back from being a wallflower, and who once sat in a rocking seat on a porch for 22 months and only rocked once. So just a guy who avoided doing anything.

And then he’s got this longer passage where he says, quote, he had developed the limp, repulsive handshake to a point of perfection seldom reached by any of us today. He had a clever trick of saying any conceivable sentence so that it sounded like, I had one grunge, but the eggplant over there. And for years, he had avoided changing his socks. Also, he pretended to be stone deaf. So this is where this comes from.

So the book is published in 1951, and then Mad Magazine picks it up around 1956. And then, you know, Mad just used it over the years in its various articles and columns, and even in the letters to the editor, the readers of Mad Magazine picked up on it as well and often used it or asked about it. And very popular with rascals and jokers like your father-in-law.

Wow, that’s amazing.

Yeah, the avoidest movement was really interesting, too, because it was exactly the kind of thing that Mad Magazine readers would catch on to and college students and high school students. So you will see this line of your father-in-law’s, I had one grunge with the eggplant over there, in college and high school yearbooks and newspapers and so forth. But the avoidance movement actually kind of became a thing. It also had the non-secretive catchphrase of, I had one once, but the wheels fell off, which is just another thing you toss into conversation.

Yeah.

I feel like I’ve heard that one before, but not gunch or grunge.

Well, I didn’t know it went so deep as all of that.

Yeah, it definitely did. Well, thank you so much for bringing that up, Roger.

Thank you so much for having me on. I’ve listened to just about all of your episodes from about 2020 until now. I just recently discovered you, but I’ve gone through them voraciously.

Wow.

Well, there’s more before 2020. There’s many years before that. But thank you for calling and take care of yourself.

Thank you.

Thanks again.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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