Thursday, February 17, 2005
On grue
If you consider yourself a gamer, you should already know what a grue is, if for only trivial reasons. If you don't, I shall explain. A grue is the most fiendish monster imaginable, and was easily the most dangerous beast in any video game. You cannot kill them, nor can you hear them coming, and if you fall victim to one, your death is painful, hideous, and... well, gruesome. Grues can only survive in the darkness, however, so the way to ward them off is simple: don't wander around in the dark. If you have a lit torch, the grue won't get you. Simple as that.
Sure, you could argue that the grue was simply a device to stop you from wandering around the game world in the dark and breaking the internal logic as a result, but that's not my point. I'm talking about grue as a word, and it must be a word, or must have been a word at some point. Look at gruesome; it shares the same structure as fearsome or loathsome. Fearsome means to evoke fear. Loathsome means to evoke loathing. Therefore, gruesome must mean to evoke grue, or grueness, or grueing, or something like that. What, therefore, is grue?
My first impulse is to consult dictionary.com, and lo and behold, we have an entry for grue:
So there you go: used to mean "to shudder, as with fear". But how do you grue, or more specifically, how does one conjugate grue? I grue, you grue, he grues, we grue, I/you/he/we grued, I am/you are/they are grueing? Google refuses to divine the answer, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere. The world may never know... (One almost grues at the thought!)
I think I have a new recipient of Best Word I Learned Today. Not as good as beeves, but that one's hard to top. (As an aside, I determined today that beef refers to both bovine meat in general, as in "I like beef", but also to cattle bred for the purpose of food. Therefore, one beef is the basically the same as one cow, but that the cow is going to be eaten.) ¶ 11:28 a.m.
If you consider yourself a gamer, you should already know what a grue is, if for only trivial reasons. If you don't, I shall explain. A grue is the most fiendish monster imaginable, and was easily the most dangerous beast in any video game. You cannot kill them, nor can you hear them coming, and if you fall victim to one, your death is painful, hideous, and... well, gruesome. Grues can only survive in the darkness, however, so the way to ward them off is simple: don't wander around in the dark. If you have a lit torch, the grue won't get you. Simple as that.
Sure, you could argue that the grue was simply a device to stop you from wandering around the game world in the dark and breaking the internal logic as a result, but that's not my point. I'm talking about grue as a word, and it must be a word, or must have been a word at some point. Look at gruesome; it shares the same structure as fearsome or loathsome. Fearsome means to evoke fear. Loathsome means to evoke loathing. Therefore, gruesome must mean to evoke grue, or grueness, or grueing, or something like that. What, therefore, is grue?
My first impulse is to consult dictionary.com, and lo and behold, we have an entry for grue:
n. [from archaic English verb for `shudder', as with fear] The grue was originated in the game Zork (Dave Lebling took the name from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" fantasies) and used in several other Infocom games as a hint that you should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of light source.
So there you go: used to mean "to shudder, as with fear". But how do you grue, or more specifically, how does one conjugate grue? I grue, you grue, he grues, we grue, I/you/he/we grued, I am/you are/they are grueing? Google refuses to divine the answer, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere. The world may never know... (One almost grues at the thought!)
I think I have a new recipient of Best Word I Learned Today. Not as good as beeves, but that one's hard to top. (As an aside, I determined today that beef refers to both bovine meat in general, as in "I like beef", but also to cattle bred for the purpose of food. Therefore, one beef is the basically the same as one cow, but that the cow is going to be eaten.) ¶ 11:28 a.m.
