Word of the Day - Gribble

One of the great things about being a ranter is that you can rant about just about everything, whether you agree with yourself or not. Ranting is its own reward. The true ranter eyes any head that is lifted above the parapet with the same enthusiasm as a cannoneer who has just taken delivery of his, or her, first consignment of grapeshot and is eagerly awaiting the order: Fire at Will.

This piece in The Times on Saturday last was a case in point, though Will on this occasion was actually Dan - Dan Brown, author of that much-loved and much-detested book The Da Vinci Code, and though Fire at Dan doesn't have quite the same ring to it, the grapeshot was still very much in evidence.

Having just finished James Becker's The Moses Stone, a rattling good yarn about BC and its unsolved mysteries, I felt a rant coming on when I read the The Times piece, for I'm obviously one of the thickos that lap this stuff up and upon whose heads the highly educated hacks who pen this pretentious prattle are so fond of heaping the old contumely.

If I cast my head a little to the left, I see three more Dan Browns jostling on the bookshelves with Golding, Eco, Pound, Eliot, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Shakespeare, Burns, Borges and Blyton, not to mention Collins, Christie, Fleming and Maclean. There are usually four (soon to be five!), but the fourth isn't on the shelves because I am reading it (well, after three Dürrenmatts in two days one is entitled to a little relaxation.)

And it was the fourth, this temporary absentee from the bookshelves, Dan Brown's Deception Point, that offered this gem of prose (p127, if you really want to be pedantic):

"This species is clearly a louse: it has a flattened body,

seven pairs of legs,and a reproductive pouch identical

in structure to wood lice, pill bugs,beach hoppers,

sow bugs, and...

(wait for it, wait for it...)

... gribbles."

Now gribble is a word I have not encountered before, not even in an Azed crossword or Spike Milligan's excellent war memoirs or the poems of Ivor Cutler, where it surely belongs. Gribble is a member, surely, of that class of words which ought to exist, but don't (yet) , like stromp, arbuley and scrotchet.

This is a gribble -

a beastie which hates sunlight, and is at its happiest when nibbling away at the sort of soft wood that people use when building wharves or piers in, for example, coastal parts of the Isle of Wight, where gribble nibbling is a bit of a local worry (see, for example, this piece from the highly literate and not-at-all-chummy Ventnorblog)

So there you are. Your vocabulary, and mine, has (or have) just increased by one.

I give you the Gribble. Do look after it.