Meaning & Analysis
To be in a bad mood, sulky, or afflicted with a stomach ache (the 'mulligrubs') for a ridiculous and self-inflicted reason, such as eating chopped hay, which is animal feed and unfit for human consumption.
Insights
Irrational Melancholy
The proverb is a sarcastic dismissal of someone's ill-temper or melancholy, implying their suffering has no legitimate or rational cause. The absurd reason of 'eating chopped hay' suggests the person's mood is baseless and foolish.
Self-Inflicted Misery
It implies that the person's unhappiness is their own fault, resulting from their own nonsensical actions or attitudes. Just as eating hay is a foolish choice leading to sickness, their bad mood is a consequence of their own poor judgment.
Contempt for Feigned Suffering
The saying is used to express contempt for someone who is feigning illness or exaggerating their suffering for attention. The bizarre imagery serves to ridicule the complaint and frame it as completely unbelievable.
Folk Psychology and Rural Imagery
The proverb's rustic imagery of 'chopped hay'—fodder for livestock—suggests rural origins and grounds the complaint in the absurd. It reflects a folk understanding of psychosomatic illness, where a bad mood ('mulligrubs', possibly linking melancholy and colic) is dismissed as being self-inflicted through foolish behavior.
Critique of Baseless Complaining
This saying functions as a form of social critique, used to mock and dismiss complaints that are perceived as baseless, exaggerated, or self-indulgent. By attributing the 'sickness' to a ridiculous cause, the speaker invalidates the sufferer's feelings and discourages what is seen as unreasonable moodiness.
Psychosomatic Expression
The term 'mulligrubs' is a colorful colloquialism that merges the concepts of a stomach ache and a sullen mood. Its use highlights a historical tendency to express psychological distress through physical symptoms, even while the proverb itself treats the condition with contempt.
Rhetorical Devices
Absurdist Imagery
The core image of a person becoming ill from eating animal fodder is a form of hyperbole that creates a deliberately absurd scenario to mock the subject's mood.
Sarcasm
The entire proverb is delivered with a sarcastic tone, using a ridiculous explanation to scornfully dismiss the legitimacy of someone's ill humor or complaint.
Colorful Colloquialism
The use of the folksy, evocative term 'mulligrubs' makes the expression more colorful and memorable than simply saying 'bad mood', adding to its dismissive, colloquial power.
Transcription
Quotations
Whose Dog lies sick o' th' mulligrups?
The Divell lyes sicke of the Mulligrups.
He is in the mulligrups.
(You are sick of).
(with eating of chopp'd Hay).
What! you are sick of the mulligrups with eating chopt hay?
Cross References
Annotations
- Spoken, with Contempt, of those who are become unreasonably out of Humour.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.