Grody (Zappa)

 Overture from the Mamas and the Papas.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVgcdq3uceQ

One of the most sublime pop songs ever performed by the Mamas and the Papas, arguably one of their greatest, is a song about Valley girls called ‘Twelve Thirty (Young Girls are coming to the Canyon)’ (1967).   It was never a big hit. Oddly, the only Top Forty hit of the even more prolific Frank Zappa was an unsublime novelty song called ‘Valley Girl’ (1982), all about the idiolect of Valley girls in California, known as Valley Speak. For this reason, for some people, the most famous word in the Zappa lexicon is ‘grody’, used by Moon Unit Zappa near the end of the song in the line “Grody to the max.” When I first noticed grody over ten years ago I wrote innocently, “Grody has not travelled beyond the shores of North America. You will not hear this word in the streets of Melbourne, though gross is a close synonym.” At that time I quarried the Urban Dictionary, where the word was added as late as 2002, thus: “Nasty, dirty, disgusting, foul, revolting, yucky.” The example sentence: “Are you sure you want to eat that Chinese food? It looks all grody.” The compilers conjectured that it was an Americanised pronunciation of the British word grotty. The Free Dictionary traced usage to the mid-1960s, where grody was an adjective meaning “Repellent, dirty, disgusting, sleazy, seedy.” There is even the comparative grodier and superlative grodiest. Zappa’s lyric reaches for the superlative of grody, if not further. It’s a piece of social satire about indulged Valley girls that doesn’t bear relistening. Revisiting grody this weekend I find, to my surprise, that the Online Etymology Dictionary states it is a variant of grotty, then confusingly a slang shortening of grotesque. Grody “had a brief vogue in 1964 as part of the argot popularized by the Beatles in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’,” which explains a lot; we recall that Paul’s dodgy grandfather was a very clean man. Paul was possibly though unaware that the word “unconsciously echoes Middle English ‘groti’ “muddy, slimy”, from Old English grotig “earthy”, from grot “particle””, according to the Dictionary, which raises the question of when something is grotesque, a word derived from Italian not Old English, and when something is grotty. Ask a Valley Girl, I guess. She will tell you when the clothes from that shop are grotesque, or grotty, or both, and why having to wash the dishes for your mother, dishes with stuff that sticks to the plates and it’s like other people’s food and y’know it’s like grody, grody to the max.   

 

This is the second of a series of essays on the words of Frank Zappa dedicated to The Hard Listening Group.