Don't know. Thought it might be a gaming reference, or just something they started using as kids to avoid grief from the parentals. :-} Type "ghu" into google and it's not useful, but type "ghu knows" in and something there might lead you to an answer. I'm not going to because I'm eating my dinner.
It's been fun, being British and not always getting the US references, to go through the second reading with Google to hand so I could find out (rather than guess) what Hooters and ChuckeCheese are, and what a "Suburban" looks like (gah, it *is* a truck! and I think I saw two on Stargate last night too) and stuff like that.
I think I saw them there too, Rachel.
BTW, OT but isn't it odd that the three UK people who started posting here seem to be all from the Bristol area?
Well, Kate is actually living in the same house as me; she's the one that got me onto reading Tuck a few weeks ago. She's been reading it practically since it started though, so I think she's mainly amused at how I'm so into it at the moment.
Gilbert, I am not certain but I am sure that ghu is a reference to some sort of diety. Tuck would not use a traditional reference to God since his dad is pretty turned off to the christian religion.
Rachel, there are terms that I have to look up and I live in the US. But it is a big country and there can be a lot of varieties of usages from one to the other.
ghu is the name of the fill-in-the-blank diety, sometimes called Ghod. It's from fandom, I think. Here's a link.
Fandom originally meant Science Fiction fandom but has expanded to mean all kinds and stripes of fannish behavior. It's why I sometimes refer to our group as Tuckfen. Fen is the fannish plural of fan.
Ghu is the same as gnu!
GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix.
The pun is that unix is a copyrighted term and gnu is not. The Free Software Foundation started making a open-source operating system that provides that same services and capabilities as unix. Check out http://www.gnu.org. Alot of gnu's herd (the core OS) has been over taken by Linux.
I thought Ghu was an acronym for "God Help Us"
So maybe Tuck/Val is really speaking to a deity???
My friends and I have used the exclamation 'Great Ghu!' since the 70's- my wife also remembers that expression from then. Upon reflection, I believe that H. Beam Piper used the term in his Federation series of SF stories written in the early 1950's.
If ghu is a religious reference, does that mean that Tuck has some sot of Belief?
A carry over from childhood when (s)he was afraid to use more colorful language. It is also UHG spelt backward!
G.H.U.:God Help Us/Goddess Help Us.