Pronounced: GRIM-thorp, verb
Notes: I don’t recall running across this word, but “grim” makes it look vaguely bad
Yesterday’s word
The word poetaster is “a bad poet; a writer of poor or mediocre verse”
First usage
Our word came into English in the late 1500s
Background / Comments
As I noted yesterday, I think I’ve posted this word before… but I had vocabulary words at work for several years and I posted words on Facebook for a year before I moved it here. I was surprised at the age of this word; I thought it was more recent. In addition, I thought that this word was just poet run together with disaster, but that’s not right. The poet part is correct (and comes from Latin), but the -aster is also Latin and is a pejorative suffix meaning “something that imperfectly resembles or mimics the real thing”.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 