A bad case of the Mulligrubs…
I can’t help myself. I love to say the word mulligrubs… even if I don’t ever want to have them.
Do you know what the mulligrubs are?
Let me give you a hint.
With cherries in season where I live… the mulligrubs are going around.
I had never heard of the mulligrubs (though I had suffered from them more than once as a child) until I met my husband. His mother’s family is from Eastern Tennessee… and the word traveled across the country with his mamaw when they moved out West.
I looked up the word in the dictionary and mulligrub does exist: it is a very old and almost extinct word for a headache or stomachache.
Far from extinct in our family, to us the mulligrubs is a stomachache that comes from eating too many cherries…. or green apples… or plums.
Mulligrubs = Too much of a good thing
So enjoy the bounty of the season (in moderation of course!)
what a fun word!
Lol! I thought that it was some kind of bug : ) I should know this word because I also had a mawmaw and paw from the south – they always had lots of fun sayings but I never heard them talking about mulligrubs. Learned something new today!
I’m from Alabama, and I always thought the mulligrubs were when you were down in the dumps, but I guess it comes from an abundance of the pits. lol!
I grew up calling it the colliewobbles. Funny!
Oh! I love that word! Even if it didn’t have a real definition! Those are sometimes the best words are the ones your family invents!
I have 20 lbs of cherries sitting in the fridge as we speak so I will do my best to avoid the mulligrubs!
Ah, so that’s what hit my grandpa so many years ago. He refuses to eat cherries, ever. Must have been a bad case of the mulligrubs!
Hi! Came over from Crafty Crow – you have such a beautiful blog! Loved this post, especially! I’ve never heard of the mulligrubs, and at first I thought it was some kind of a cherry worm. Ugh. I’d heard of collywobbles, though, and apparently there is a very noisy game called Whoo Hoo Collywobbles that sounds like a parents’ nightmare- I don’t think it has any rules, just noise.
Wanted to say hello and also share my daughters’ word for “eating too much of one thing” – “bamble”. You’d use it like this: “Hey, Jenna is bambling the pears! Stop her!” or “I love chocolate so much that I’m going to bamble all of it.”
So if we combine both words, we’d get
“You’ll get the mulligrubs if you bamble all those cherries!”
What fun! I must tell the kids about the mulligrubs, too! Thank you!
LiEr