Port Out, Starboard Home by Michael Quinion

Author:Michael Quinion
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gry

Nobody seems to be absolutely sure how it started, but quite suddenly in the mid-1990s everybody concerned with language in North America, from librarians to newspaper columnists to dictionary makers to experts on word history were deluged with enquiries along the lines of: ‘There are three words in English ending in -gry. I only know hungry and angry. Please tell me what the third one is. I’m going mad trying to find the answer.’ The craze for trying to solve this curious conundrum even crossed the Atlantic to Britain. In the years since, there have been further sporadic outbreaks, like a plague that has mainly run its course but occasionally flares up.

The reason why so many people were tearing their hair out is that there is no third common word in English ending in -gry, though there are several rare or obsolete ones. So why were so many people desperate to find something that didn’t exist?

It seems that the question had been taken from some old book of puzzles, had been given publicity, perhaps on a radio programme (Richard Lederer says it was on the Bob Grant radio talk show on WMCA in New York City in 1975), had taken the fancy of large numbers of people, and had been passed by word of mouth across North America, becoming corrupted on the way, until later hearers only received the bastardized version I’ve already quoted. I’ve seen various versions of the supposed original form of the riddle. It may have been something like:

There are two words that end with ‘gry’.

Angry is one and hungry is another.

What is the third word.

Everyone uses it every day and

Everyone knows what it means.

If you have been listening,

I have already told you what the word is.

One of the first mistakes in transmission appears to have been the inclusion of a question mark at the end of the third line. This turned a simple bit of verbal trickery, whose answer is what, into a fruitless exercise in lexicographical detection. Another version is:

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