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What is Glurge?

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What is Glurge?

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The term glurge was invented by a regular contributor to Snopes.com, a website dedicated to cataloging and often debunking urban legends. Unfortunately, while the word glurge may be fictional, the phenomenon it describes is not. Glurge is best described as the cloyingly sentimental stories, testimonials and object lessons frequently sent as email or chain letters. Glurge can also be experienced at the end of religious services or motivational speeches, usually in the form of a ‘true’ example of perseverance against seemingly impossible odds. There is usually no malicious intent by the sender of glurge, but the messages may not be as inspirational as the sender had hoped. Many examples of glurge tend to collapse under their own weight, as the writer adds one impossible circumstance upon another to drive home the moral of the story. One such example of overwrought glurge concerns a novice mountain climber who loses a contact lens. After asking God for a miraculous recovery of the lens, t

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Think of it as chicken soup with several cups of sugar mixed in: It’s supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits. In ordinary language, glurge is the sending of inspirational (and supposedly “true”) tales, ones that often conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer or undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering a “true story.” Many of us, it seems, cannot overcome the urge to glurge. Ratings Key = true = false = multiple truth values = undetermined = unclassifiable veracity Select this link for an expanded definition of our rating system. Missionary is protected from murderous attackers by the miraculous appearance of 26 armed guards. Temple Baptist Church was built on land sold for fifty-seven cents, the amount saved by a little girl

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Asked in Exams, Education & References at 4:13 AM on February 18, 2008 Tags: glurge

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Glurge is a neologism describing a certain kind of melodramatic, saccharine story. The defining characteristic of glurge is that, while its purpose is to make the reader happy, the feel-good aspect is so overdone that some readers are likely to be nauseated rather than inspired. It often has a religious theme and is most commonly circulated via e-mail in the form of a chain letter. The Snopes message board has a Glurge Gallery, where I found this: Aren’t dandelions a bright pretty flower in the springtime? They tell us that spring has arrived. Children love bringing bouquets of them to their mothers, and mothers are delighted with the thoughtfulness of their children. If left unattended, though, dandelions can cover the whole lawn and spread very quickly throughout the neighbourhood via thousands of blown seeds. Our neighbour attacked her dandelion problem. Rather than use chemicals, she chose to dig out each root. Morning and night, she was out there digging and digging. It took her m

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