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“It is seenteen hundred linen,” said the pedlar, giving a tweak to one of the shirts, in that knowing manner with which matrons and judges ascertain the texture of the loom ; “it’s seenteen hundred linen, and as strong as an it were dowlas. Nevertheless, mother, your bidding is to be done ; and I would have done Mr. Mordaunt’s bidding too,” he added, relaxing from his note of defiance, into the deferential whining tone with which he cajoled his customers, “if he hadna made use of profane oaths which made my very flesh grue, and caused me, in some sort, to forget myself.”
The butcher was covered in the accumulated grue of a hard day's work
There was grue everywhere after the accident
1958, Samuel Youd, writing as John Christopher, The Caves of Night:
'I've told you - it wasn't much. He tried to kiss me.' She smiled slightly. 'Just after he had shown me the family skeletons.' / 'What a lovely bit of grue!'
1996, Linda Badley, Writing Horror and the Body
Carrie is Cinderella in the body language of menstrual blood and raging hormones. King’s adolescent joy in grimaces and groans, the Mad magazine humor, and the staple of “grue” hardly need mentioning.
2002, Carole Nelson Douglas, Chapel Noir
“ She is quite agreeable to gruesome ghost stories, but appalled by the lust for life.” / “I admit that I am surprised by how well she handles sheer grue, better than I.”
2004, Talbot Mundy, Guns of the Gods
“This is the grue,” said Dick, holding his lantern high. / Its light fell on a circle of skeletons, all perfect, each with its head toward a brass bowl in the center.
Etymology 3
Probably from gruesome; first used in Jack Vance's Dying Earth universe in the 1940s, but popularized by the text-based computer game Zork in 1980.
I managed to get into the house through the front once, but I was plunged into darkness and eaten by a monster called a grue.
2009, Jas, “Hazadous Australian animals the GRUE.... your guide”, in rec.travel.australia+nz (Usenet):
To find a grue, turn off the light at night, or go for a walk in a dark place (but carry a flashlight with you).
2004, M.D. Dollahite, “How would you imagine a grue?”, in rec.games.int-fiction (Usenet):
Incidentally, the best official text description I know of is in Sorcerer, when you actually become a grue and visit a grue colony. IIRC, even that description is vague, but does cannonize that they are large four-legged reptiles.
Blend of green + blue. The philosophy sense was coined by American philosopher Nelson Goodman in 1955 to illustrate concepts in the philosophy of science. The linguistic sense was coined by American linguist Paul Kay in 1975[1] as a translation from languages such as Welsh that have a basic cover term that covers both the hues called "green" and "blue" in English.
The grue property is defined as: x is grue if and only if x is green and is observed before the year 2000, or x is blue and is not observed before the year 2000.
2007, Michael Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z:
The unexamined emeralds cannot be both green and grue, since if they are grue and unexamined they are blue.
(slang)Nutraloaf, a bland mixture of foods served in prisons.
References
^ Nancy Bonvillain (1993) Language, Culture, and Communication, 4th edition, Pearson Education, published 2003, →ISBN, page 58: “ Kay (1975) later revised the original sequence somewhat in order to account for the fact that certain languages […] encode a color of "green-blue" that may occur before labeling "yellow." Kay called this color category "GRUE" […]”
Jacob Poole (d. 1827) (before 1828) William Barnes, editor, A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, published 1867, page 43