Testing . . . One, Two – Frank McNally on the surprising connections of a sensitive body part

Further to The Kennedys of Castleross, which we were discussing last week (Irishman's Diary September 4th), two separate readers have shared a story from the programme's later years, when it was being written by Hugh Leonard.

Over time, Leonard formed the opinion that some actors were failing to convey the intended sense of his lines. He suspected this was because they were not reading the scripts before performing. The producer assured him otherwise, but the writer decided to test his theory one day by planting a landmine in the text. As supplied to me by Joe Taylor, here's the relevant extract.

Mrs Kennedy: Ah, Peadar, how are you?

Peadar: Grand, Mary.

First Family – Frank McNally on the surprising origins of Ireland’s original soap opera, The Kennedys of Castleross

---

Kingdom Come (and Gone) – Frank McNally on holidays in Kerry, the myth of Tír na nÓg, and the demise of Big Phil

---

How a Belfast prisoner of war used Irish language to defy Japanese captors

---

The Puck Stops Here – Frank McNally on the royal goats, psychedelic sheep, and fearsome midges of Kerry

---

Mrs Kennedy: I wish I could say the same for Christy.

Peadar: Why?

Mrs Kennedy: I’m worried about him, Peadar. His testicles haven’t descended yet.

I am unsure what age the character of Christy was then, but I know he was played for a time by Vincent Dowling, who was in his 40s when Leonard was writing. Anyway, after stumbling on this bombshell, the actors burst out laughing and Leonard's suspicions were vindicated. Alas, the line did not make it to air.

***

When vouching for the truth of a story like that, a term we often use is, "It's Gospel". This may be especially apt here because, as etymologists among you will know, the word "Testament", as in the Old and New Testaments, has the same origin as the parts of Christy that hadn't dropped yet. Both are from the Latin testis, meaning "witness".

The usual theory for why male genitalia are so named is that they “testified” to a man’s virility. But there is an alternative explanation which would explain an otherwise mysterious line in the script of a drama even greater that the Kennedys of Castleross, The Bible.

The line is from Genesis 24:2, where Abraham makes a servant swear an oath. Before which, in my version, he asks him to: “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh.”

This features in a 2011 book about the hidden connections of language, The Etymologicon, by Mark Forsythe, which points out that the Hebrew version doesn't say "thigh". The word used instead is "yarek", meaning, as Forsythe translates it loosely, "soft bits". Hence a belief of many scholars that, in ancient times, people took oaths not by crossing their hearts and hoping to die, but by placing their hands "on the testicles of the man to whom they were swearing".

It's certainly an arrangement that would require a lot of trust from both parties. But by the way, and apologies if you're reading this while having avocado on toast for breakfast, Forsyth also explains where the name of that now ultra-fashionable fruit derives. It's from an Aztec word ahuakatl, also meaning testicle, because that's what Aztecs thought it resembled. Enjoy your toast.

***

Getting back to Hugh Leonard, I mentioned here earlier in the summer that he seems to have been responsible for popularising the now classic Hiberno-English insult "gobshite". I have since learned that, in fact, that word first appeared in print in America, more than a century ago. But according to the OED, it has since become "chiefly Irish". Hence its belated debut in the New York Times this summer (as noted by a Twitter account that records such milestones), via a feature on Roddy Doyle.

Anyway, still fresh from hearing of gobshite’s NYT debut, I was browsing Twitter again recently when I saw a tweet from Time magazine. It was promoting an article about how Covid-19 has disturbed sleep patterns, but it featured a word I had never expected to see in that esteemed journal.

The tweet began: "The quarantine has completely bollixed people's sleep cycle", which almost causing me to choke on my avocado. At first, I wondered if some Irish intern had taken over Time's Twitter account. Then I looked it up and was amazed to find that the verb "to bollix", although having the same testicular origins as here, has somehow become polite usage in American English. Nor, despite being spelt as pronounced in a Dublin accent, does it have any Irish overtones there, even if the most recent of many examples quoted by Webster's Online Dictionary was from a feature in – speaking of Gospel – the Christian Science Monitor, about Saoirse Ronan.

As is usual in the US now, the CSM was using the verb to mean only “messed up”. There was no rudeness, or reference to gonads, intended. Even so, I can’t but wonder what poor Mrs Kennedy would have been of the CSM’s suggestion, vis-à-vis one of Ronan’s film characters, that she had been “bollixed by adolescence”.