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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
We Irish have enriched the English language with a slew of snazzy gems. Did you know we're the ones behind quarks , electrons and vectors , Sudocrem and Wellington boots? No surprise that we invented begrudgery , but croquet and Wunderkind were us too! So if some yahoo is getting on your nerves , don't box him in the gob – hit him with Irishisms galore , and you'll soon put the kibosh on his shaninagans . Y' dig ? Written and illustrated by Colin Murphy and Donal O'Dea, the craggy old blokes behind the bestselling Feckin' Collection and Stuff Irish People Love.
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Contents
Who Gives a Focal?
Balbriggan (noun)
Some people may not be aware of the fact but the name of the north County Dublin town was on the lips, or more accurately, on the backsides of countless people all over the world back in the nineteenth century.
Balbriggan, in case you didn’t know it, is a fabric, and a famous one at that. It was a finely knitted cotton or wool material that was originally used for men’s underwear, which covered almost the entire body from neck to ankles and everything in between. It was napped on the inside so that men’s sensitive dangly bits would be nice and cosy. In fact, the boys reported them so cosy that soon the ladies had their knickers in a twist in the rush to get their own balbriggans.
The company behind the balbriggan boom was called Smyth & Co., founded in 1780, which had centralised the local cottage industry of knitting stockings.
Word rapidly spread about the underwear’s comfort and warmth levels, and the knitting ladies of the County Dublin town were only bleedin’ delighra with all the work that came their way. By the mid-nineteenth century many a royal bod 6was almost entirely enveloped by a balbriggan, including Queen Victoria, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Tsarina Alexandra of Russia and Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The fact that balbriggans couldn’t be removed quickly probably goes some way towards explaining that era’s prudish attitude to physical aspects of romance – the balbriggan must have been a total passion-killer, not to mention a serious pain in the arse to anyone with gastric issues.
John Wayne (1907–1979).
Besides the royal backsides that the garment kept snug, balbriggans were popular with cowboys in the Wild West and John Wayne refers to them in several movies, telling one character to ‘put your balbriggans on’. 7The Irish polar explorer Ernest Shackleton also liked the underwear, presumably because he didn’t want to test the old adage that the Antarctic was ‘cold enough to freeze the b**** off a …’. You get the picture.
Sadly, the original mill closed in 1980, ending a 200-year tradition of neck-to-toe knickers. And so ends this brief history.
Banshee (noun)
Phrases such as ‘screaming like a banshee’ and ‘wild as a banshee’ are common in America. There are roller-coaster rides called ‘The Banshee’ (because of the screams the rides elicit) and dressing up as a banshee at Halloween is common, yet most people in the US had little or no idea that the word had Irish origins until the award-winning movie The Banshees of Inisherin came out.
The term originates from bean (no, not the baked things that come out of a tin in tomato sauce – it’s pronounced ban) meaning woman, and sí (pronounced she), which is the singular form of sidhe, meaning the fairy folk said to inhabit the earthen mounds that you can see dotted around the Irish countryside. So a banshee is a woman of the fairy mound. The screaming thing associated with banshees comes from the fact that if you hear their keening, which is a loud, piercing and mournful wailing, then tough shit, because a member of your nearest and dearest relations is about to, or already has, kicked the bucket. In some cases, the banshee’s wailing is so piercing and horrendous that it is said to shatter windows, in much the same way as a Westlife concert. 9
Bard (noun)
When most people hear the word bard, their minds immediately conjure up an image of that most English of Englishmen, William Shakespeare. But the original bards were anything but English. They were the prehistoric Celtic poets and storytellers hired by local big shots like kings or chieftains to basically sing their praises and tell them and anyone who would listen just what wonderful, powerful, virile, generous and good-looking guys they were, even if the said king/chieftain was a wojus, ugly, mean-as-shite bowsie.
Bards were also employed to slag the hell out of any rivals. Think of them as ancient spin doctors or PR consultants. The bards have been around for yonks and are even mentioned by the Roman writer Lucan in the first century AD, but their associations with Ireland stretches back into Irish mythology, with the Tuatha Dé Danann numbering many bards among their lot. The original old Irish word is also bard.
The Welsh and Scots also had their own bardic traditions, but the Welsh 10custom faded out in the fourteenth century while in Scotland, bard became a derogatory term for an itinerant musician. The bards were around in Ireland until the mid-seventeenth century, but they faded from existence with the reconquest of Ireland by England, and the decline of the Irish chieftains, so we can blame the Brits for their disappearance. So there’s some irony in the fact that one such Brit, Shakespeare, came to be known as ‘the Bard’, by which time the Irish bards were, to quote the Bard’s history play Henry VI, ‘as dead as a doornail’.
A related term that you’d be forgiven for not having heard is bardolatry, which is more commonly known among theatre luvvies because it refers to an excessive reverence for Shakespeare. While he admired the Bard’s works, George Bernard Shaw considered Shakespeare the recipient of too much praise and once described one of his plays as ‘stagey trash’. He also remarked that he’d love to disinter the man and throw stones at his corpse, especially as he believed the Bard hadn’t engaged with the social problems of his time, as Shaw had in his own work.
But these comments were most likely not because of Shaw’s hatred of Hamlet, etc., but of the fawning admiration some Shakespearean fans heaped on him. In the bardolater’s eyes, the Bard can do no wrong, and no criticism will be brooked, even when it is measured commentary, e.g. the 11anti-Semitism in the Merchant of Venice or Iago’s lack of a motive in Othello. The bardolater will bend over backwards and do literary somersaults to contrive excuses to explain these inconveniences away.
Shaw coined the term from bard (obviously!) and idolater (a worshipper of idols).
Beaufort Scale (noun)
If you’ve ever heard the sea area forecast on the radio, you’ve probably heard this term but never given it a second thought. You might have also encountered it at school when you were supposed to be learning about the trade winds and the polar westerlies, but you were actually dreaming of snogging the girl/guy at the desk in row two.
Well, time to catch up on your neglected meteorological studies, because the Beaufort Scale, which is still in use over two centuries later, is named after its inventor, Francis Beaufort. And while he may have been a member of the British Navy and is usually claimed by Britain (what success story isn’t, haha?), Francis was 12 actually Irish. He was born on 27 May 1774 in Navan, County Meath, where his father was a Protestant minister and a member of the Royal Irish Academy on Dawson Street, Dublin. Francis joined the navy at the age of fifteen and barely before he’d had time to yell ‘Ahar, me hearties!’ his ship was wrecked, largely due to an inaccurate chart. This experience put wind in the sails of Francis’s ambition to improve upon the accuracy of charts and wind/tidal measurements, and he ultimately became a highly respected hydrographer in the navy.
Francis Beaufort (1774–1857).
Up until that point, winds were described only in subjective terms, i.e. one first mate’s ‘it’s strong enough to blow grannies off a pier’ was another’s ‘it’s strong enough to blow the knickers off a nun’. Francis standardised the 13whole thing on a scale of 0–12, the higher end describing a hurricane.
An interesting side note: as a respected scientist, Francis was the one who invited Charles Darwin on the second voyage of HMS Beagle, a serendipitous choice indeed, and it was on that very voyage that the Beaufort Scale was officially adopted for the first time.
And to finish on a rather scandalous point, when Francis’s coded diary was deciphered after his death, it revealed that he was plagued with guilt about an incestuous affair he’d had with his sister, Harriet, between his two marriages. It’s an ill wind that blows no good …
Begrudgery (noun)
In Ireland, you can be as successful as you want, just so long as you’re not any more successful than the rest of us. But if you do happen to gain financial or artistic or sporting or political or any kind of success that puts you on an even slightly higher plane, you will immediately be the subject of begrudgery.
For some reason, Irish people don’t like other 14Irish people getting above their station, as they see it. Why? Well, one possible explanation is that, in other countries, they’ve been used to hierarchical monarchies for centuries and have accepted on some level that some people will have (merited or otherwise) more success/wealth than others. Where no monarchies exist, such as America, the drive to succeed is part of their very culture and so is respected. Not so in modern Ireland, where we have a largely classless society, therefore someone elevating her/himself slightly can expect a rapid slap on the back of the head in the form of comments like ‘don’t you be losin’ the run of yourself, ye little shite!’ or ‘it’s a long way from feckin’ Chateau Lafite-Rothschild Bordeaux ye were raised, ye manky little bollix!’
But to the word itself. Actually ‘begrudge’ (v) is a word of English origin, meaning ‘to find fault with’. But so ingrained in Irish society is our resentment of others’ success, we have added to the store of related words in the international dictionary by appending an ‘ry’ to it, and thereby inventing a new noun, making begrudgery a word of uniquely Irish origin. Last word to the famed eighteenth-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson, who quite appropriately said of us: ‘The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.’ 15
Beyond the Pale (saying)
In 2010, a US Republican strategist called Karl Rove described certain remarks by President Obama as ‘beyond the pale’, and in 2008, Barack Obama himself described certain crimes as ‘beyond the pale’. What both men probably didn’t realise is that unless they were speaking from within an area incorporating Louth, Dublin and parts of Meath and Kildare, they were each beyond the Pale themselves!
A little bit of history. In the decades after the initial Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, the Normans fell under our bewitching eye, and before you could impale a baby on a pike, they were forming alliances with local chieftains, falling for Irish cailíní left, right and centre, churning out snappers by the cartload, learning Irish jigs and getting rat-arsed like any self-respecting Irishman. They had become, according to historians, ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. This was especially the case in the counties outside the area under direct English influence, i.e. the 16aforementioned eastern counties. In fact, relations deteriorated so much between the Normans who had gone native and the English that they constructed a barrier of sorts surrounding this area using ‘pales’ (from the Latin palus, meaning stake) and ditches, parts of which are still visible today. Everyone ‘beyond the Pale’ was considered a shower of savages by the snooty Sassenachs, thus giving us the widely used term. Those beyond the Pale could also be slagged as ‘culchies’, meaning rural Irish, but this handy insult didn’t make it into standard English.
Nowadays, Beyond the Pale is a three-day music festival in Wicklow, which allows thousands of people (mostly from within the Pale) to listen to music, dance wildly, get gee-eyed drunk and indulge in carnal pleasure with total strangers. Just like their Hiberno-Norman ancestors.
Blarney (noun)
Widely used in the English-speaking world to describe talk that is excessively complimentary and flattering or that stretches the truth somewhat, blarney should never be confused with bullshit, which more describes 17outright lies. To quote the Irish Fenian politician John O’Connor Power: ‘Blarney is something more than mere flattery. It is flattery sweetened by humour and flavoured by wit.’
The ability to weave magic words with your lips and tongue is, of course, acquired by kissing the Blarney Stone, which is set into the battlements of Blarney Castle in County Cork. The legend (one of several) goes that the chieftain Cormac Laidir was worried about a forthcoming legal matter so he prayed to the Irish goddess of love, Clíodhna, who appeared to him and told him to kiss the first stone he saw on the way to court, and he duly obeyed, 18
