Diarmaid Ó Muirithe has been spreading his love of words and their origins through his column in this newspaper for 15 years, writes Kieran Fagan
Words are like pebbles on the beach of history, shaped - sometimes mis-shaped - by thousands of years of wear and tear, use and abuse. Most of us just reach for words, using those that come to hand, not thinking how they came to be there, or what made them the way they are. Occasionally we, being Celts, take a word and send it spinning and bouncing across the waves of meaning. "Come up Kinch, come up you fearful Jesuit!" Joyce did it all the time.
And on that beach, in weekly dialogue with Irish Times readers, colloguing sometimes - there's the odd flash of mischief - stands Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, lexicographer and etymologist. Those long grey words boil down to "lover of language". All his life he has listened to the way we speak. For the past 15 years he has engaged readers in a weekly column lifting those stones, identifying, opining, enlightening. The bazooka, that tubular anti-tank rocket, owes its name to a trombone-like instrument confected of two gas pipes played by a comedian-cum-musician in 1935, he tells us. "The constant Gaelicisation of the good old English/Scottish word crack as craic sets my teeth on edge." It harks back to a meaning it never had, boozing and high jinks, he insists.
There are exotic birds on this shore. Like blonde bombshell actress Joanna Lumley (my description, not his). "Isn't she just?" I try to ask. "Yes, she's an egghead. We correspond about words." He and Joanna took on the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary about their description of the word "fad" as being of unknown origin. Joanna maintained it came from the Malagasy language of Madagascar, which is based on the languages of the Malay Peninsula. He met Joanna Lumley through the British magazine The Oldie, edited by Richard Ingrams. There, too, he met the late Auberon Waugh, a "nice, inoffensive, quiet man" whose rudeness in print was legendary.
Ó Muirithe is one of a precious circle of Irish Times contributors who speak directly to their readers - and their readers speak back. Others include Brendan McWilliams, Flann Ó Riain, Derek (Crosaire) Crozier, George Ryan and Michael Viney.
A trade unionist asks Ó Muirithe to explain how some workers get the sack, and others are fired. This goes back to medieval times, when a tradesman carried his tools around in a sack. At the end of the job he was handed his pay and his tools. If he misbehaved, he was given the sack. If he misbehaved badly he was dismissed and his tools burned. Hence fired.
When a player funks a tackle, why is a despairing voice from the terraces in Cork heard to cry despairingly: "He have a touch of the higos", or "he have the higo sh**es"? Ó Muirithe finds the answer in a dictionary of Cork slang. The "higos" refers to the Highland Light Infantry, "a regiment despised by the Cork people and not known for their bravery". An encounter with a travelling woman in Wexford yields another description for malfunctioning innards. "The child has the tetters," she explains, using an Old English word for ringworm.
There was not enough room to swing a cat. But the cat was not a furry creature hogging the fireplace. It was the cat o' nine tails used to whip miscreant seamen. Or was it? Did it refer to berthing small colliers, known as cats? The word cliche we owe to the French, and it was once a printer's tool, known in English as a stereotype, later being used to describe the hackneyed or stale. Now it has come full circle, as newspapers are full of cliches. The phrase "stoney broke" we probably owe to an impoverished Irish adventurer, Andrew Robinson Stoney, who married an heiress for her money, but it was all in a trust fund, and he died as he lived, stoney broke. His tight-fisted wife, Countess Mary Eleanor Bowes, an ancestor of the late British Queen Mother, was "partial to bouts of unbridled houghmagandie", which Ó Muirithe explains was poet Robbie Burns's phrase for "how's your father?".
Diarmaid Ó Muirithe is now 71. Though retired from his academic post teaching Irish in UCD, his mission never ends. It began in New Ross, Co Wexford. He served 10 years as a primary teacher, then worked in RTÉ as a translator and bilingual journalist, read news on radio and TV for another 10, won the first Jacob's Award for a radio programme, Idir Súgradh agus Dáiríre, and his script helped RTÉ win the international Nordring Prize. He made 16 documentaries for TV, working often with producer Gerry Murray. He has had 12 radio plays broadcast. He is now a widower with five grown-up children and a scatter of grandchildren, and lives in Dungarvan, Co Waterford. A retired horseman, he is still cross with the Oxford dictionary people about their derivation of "Tally Ho" from an unattested French word.
"Clearly none of them ever attended a hunt, or they would know that in English dialect a tally is a fox's brush, or tail."
• Words We Use, a selection of Diarmaid Ó Muirithe's columns for The Irish Times, has just been published by Gill & Macmillan, Dublin
