mulligrubs \MUHL-i-gruhbz\,
noun:
Ill temper; colic; grumpiness.
"That's a comfortable place to be." The barber chuckled. "You're a philosopher, sir, a philosopher." "I am, but I'm a blue one. I have the blue mulligrubs."
-- Brian Lynch, "The Winter of Sorrow"
Right Rosa Solis, as ever washed mulligrubs out of a moody brain!
-- Sir Walter Scott, "The Waverley Novels"
It is easy enough to say that a pessimist is a person afflicted with an incurable case of mulligrubs — one whom nothing in all earth or heaven or hades pleases; one who usually deserves nothing, yet grumbles if he gets it.
-- William Cowper Brann, "Beauty and the Beast," Brann: The Iconoclast
This fanciful formation was developed in 1599 as a synonym for 'a fit of the blues' and an alteration of megrims.
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