You will have heard that Eskimos have up to 50 words for snow. It makes sense of course, when you spend most of your life surrounded by the stuff.
Yes, clearly, familiarity breeds content.
Even during the Great Blizzard of last month people remarked on the quality of the snowflakes and how much finer they were than would usually be the case in Ireland.
Those Siberian winds and Portuguese Emma produced such snow as would barely hold together as snowballs or snowpersons. There being no snowmen anymore. Had it stayed longer we might have come up with our very own new word for that unique snow.
Then, days after the Greatest Blizzard of Our Time, former president Mary McAleese uttered those immortal words in Rome about the ban on women priests in the Catholic Church being based on “codology dressed up as theology”. The most researched word on Google next day was “codology”.
An American priest asked me whether the word had anything to do with fish? I assured him not. “It might be associated with the fishy, but never cod,” I said. “It meant ‘nonsense’, in Ireland,” I explained.
Then I recalled how, when former US vice-president Joe Biden used the word “malarkey” to dismiss something as nonsense, it too caused a run at Google. And of course we have another word in Ireland for nonsense, “raiméis”.
It set me wondering, why have we Irishry so many words for nonsense? Is it because, like the Eskimos and snow, we are generally surrounded by so much of it?
And words like malarkey and raiméis, not to mention codology, are so sturdily cheery there seems something positive in how we use them, spit them out there.
You know how they say about us Irish that all our wars are merry and all our songs are sad?
My theory is that the reason we enjoy our wars so much is that in fighting them we are attempting to defeat nonsense in the interests of the sane, the reasonable, something we could live with. An eventual realisation at the impossibility of that in this life is why our songs are sad.
Codology, from a cod as "humbug" or "hoax" is believed first recorded in Ireland, and in the Nation newspaperof July, 1847. Also in James Joyce's Ulysses. "Bloom comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business . . ."
inaword@irishtimes.com
