Grub Street
- noun
- Offensive
:
Grub Street
- After all, he was a gentleman forced to support himself with his pen like any other Grub Street hack.
Examples
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The novel, written by a Grub Street writer, was filled with cliches and lacked originality.
-
Half of Grub Street, it seemed, was clamoring at the gate.
Fiction book (1990) -
This post was originally featured on Grub Street Daily.
Blog text (3) -
Grub Street
Blog text (23) -
For the briefest moment I considered getting my hands somehow on a gun and firing on those Grub Street vultures.
Fiction book (1990) -
"It's really nice to walk into a restaurant without a dress on," Sam Sifton, the national editor of the New York Times and former restaurant critic, tells Grub Street, before explaining himself: "I never really did that!" he laughs.
Blog text (7) -
Balzac's portrayal of conniving publishers and desperate Grub Street authors is too often taken at face value as a realistic rendering of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century Paris.
Academic text (1995) -
Many aspiring authors dream of escaping the reputation of being just another Grub Street hack.
-
The bustling cafes of Grub Street were filled with people exchanging ideas and criticism of each other's work.
How Prestigious
Surface Forms
Morphology
Grub + street
‘Grub Street’ is a historical place-name and label for hack or low-status literary writers; this culturalized, lexicalized meaning cannot be derived from the literal words 'grub' (food/insect/dirt) and 'street' (road/neighbourhood). Because it is a proper name and an idiomatic, culture-specific label rather than a compositional phrase, a B1 learner who knows the constituents would not be able to predict its meaning.
Etymology
Grub Street comes from a real London street where poor writers and printers sold lots of cheap work and survived on 'grub', a word for simple food. Because these writers wrote mainly for money and not for art, Grub Street came to mean 'the world of low-status writers'.