The Grouble With Gribbles

Imagine my surprise to learn that a gribble is an actual thing!  I thought it was just the odd noise a hamburger corporation mascot makes in 1980s television commercials.  But no, a gribble is in general a white, quite pale, crustacean.  Here's a delightful sentence from the Brittanica online: They feed on algae, driftwood, & the submerged wood of docks & wharves & sometimes attack the nonwoody insulation of submarine cables.

Perhaps the author of that article got a tad too judgmental in the last sentence.  "Attack"?  Perhaps I should investigate further - the image of a gribble "attacking" something it wants to eat is perhaps akin to one "attacking" a meal when one is hungry.

Instead, I decide to look at pictures of gribbles.  Here's one:

One image, two gribbles.  It's from an article entitled "The Gribble Worm Could Hold Secrets for Cheaper Renewable Energy."  It's a bit weird that they outright call the gribble a worm in the headline but say in the first sentence: Perhaps you can tell by their name, but gribble worms are not the most beloved of crustaceans.

What the hell?  Does the word "gribble" automatically sound pejorative to you?  How can I tell by its name that it's not the most beloved of crustaceans?  & by the way, how can you be trusted if you call something both a worm & a crustacean?  Worms aren't crustaceans.  That seems pretty easy to research.

But I wondered if I wasn't cool enough to know what "gribble" might mean, especially to the hip Popular Mechanics crowd (that's where the article is).  So I went to the trusty Urban Dictionary, which tells me that gribble is the slang term in Hawaii for falling or "eating it."  As usual, there's a helpful sample sentence: Sam gribbled on the turf.

Let me just state that I don't see or hear any relationship in the word gribble with eating wood, being loved, or falling down.  In fact, the word is quite young, having entered the English language barely two hundred years ago - centuries in fact after sailors probably noticed them eating their piers.  Etymologists don't know exactly where the word comes from, but most seem to think it's a slight variation on "grub."  & sure, "grubby" is an insulting term, but I don't hear "grubby" in "gribble."  Seriously, all I can hear is some variation of what the Hamburglar said in old commercials (although I think it was "robble robble" & not "gribble gribble").

Can I tell you two more things about gribbles?  They're from the Wikipedia article.

One: Gribbles play an ecologically important role, by helping to degrade & recycle driftwood. Most seaweed boring gribbles attack holdfasts & their activities can cause the seaweed to come adrift especially during storms.

& two: For defense, gribbles can jam themselves within their burrows using their uropods & block the tunnel with their rear disc-shaped segment, the pleotelson.

Now, I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it doesn't suggest to me an animal people naturally hate.  But if you're going to be mean to an animal that helps degrade & recycle driftwood, I hope it jams its uropods & sticks its pleotelson in your stupid face.