Taffety gentility; make-believe aristocratic blood. Grogram is a coarse silk taffety stiffened with gum (French, gros-grain).
“Our first tragedian was always boasting of his being ‘an old actor,ʹ and was full of the ‘blood of the Grograms.ʹ”—C. Thomson: Autobiography, p. 200.
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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.
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