EMMET AND GROCKLE/ˈɛmɪt/, /ˈɡrɒk(ə)l/
A tourist, especially in Cornwall and Devon.
The word emmet actually means an ant. If you’re a local resident it’s an excellent term to describe the hordes of tourists that descend on your locality to enjoy the summer weather, beaches and countryside of Cornwall, in the process clogging the narrow local roads and generally getting in the way of everyday life. It comes from the Old English aemette, which developed one way into our standard English ant, another into emmet, which survived as a dialect word. The dictionaries first record it in the tourism sense from the mid 1970s, but I remember it being used some years earlier as an already well-established term.
One peculiarity is that it’s used mainly in Cornwall; if you cross the River Tamar into Devon you will instead hear grockle, a word that can now be found in other tourist areas as well. One theory is that this had its origin in the name of the famous Swiss clown, Grock, who was well known in Britain in the 1950s. A resident of Torquay, the biggest resort on the south Devon coast, was said to have remarked that visitors resembled grockles, little Grocks, because of their boorishness and clownish behaviour.
However, recent research by the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the word wasn’t generally known before it was popularised in the film The System in 1962. The script-writer picked the word up from the locals during filming in Torquay. Evidence from local people suggest the name came from a strip cartoon in the comic Dandy entitled Danny and his Grockle. (The grockle was a magical dragon-like creature.) As usual, we are left with loose ends, in particular where the writer of the cartoon got the name from, but this seems pretty definitive.
Last updated 29 Jul 2000
