Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill has two splendid poems in the 1998 edition of Irisleabhar Mha Nuad about the Aurora Borealis. In a fascinating introduction to the poems she tells of speaking to the Kerry folklorist, Dr Joe Daly, about local words for the phenomenon. She herself had heard An Chaor Aduaidh, the northern flare. Dr Daly told her that the usual term used by the people in his young days was The Borey Dancers. A lovely conceit this is, as the poet says: the image of the multicoloured curtains sweeping across the sky like a group of dancers. It is indeed, and she might be interested to know that in Orkney they have a similar conceit, and a very old one too. In Wallace's Description of the Orkney Islands, written in 1693, I came across this: `The North Light is, by reason of its desultory motion, called Morrice Dancers.' Poetic peoples think alike.
My colleague in UCD, the late Alan Bliss, some twenty years ago published an edition of Swift's Dialogue in Hybernian Stile, written about 1735. I have just finished reading it again; it is important because apart from the evidence contained in it and in Swift's other work, Irish Eloquence, nothing is known of the language spoken by the planters at this period. Swift showed that their English had sub-standard and dialectal features, and that it had been strongly influenced by Irish. Consider these: `Them apples is very good'; `I am again you in that'; `Lord, I was so boddered the other day with that prating fool Tom!' (boddered, deafened. Compare Irish bodhar); `Pray, how does he get his health? (Remember Raftery's ma Fhaghaimse Slainte...?) ; `He's often very unwell' (unwell was first introduced to England by Lord Chesterfield in 1785. Said he : `I am what you call in Ireland, and a very good expression it is, unwell.'); `Why, sometimes sowins (Irish sughan, flummery) and in summer we have the best frawhawns (Irish fraochtain, bilberries) in all the county'; `Why, he's a meer buddough (Irish bodach, churl). He sometimes coshers with me (lodges, Irish coisir, banquet), and once a month I take a pipe with him and we shoh (take every second turn, Irish seach) it about for an hour together'; `I have seen him riding on a sougane (sugan here a straw saddle); `He is no better than a swawlpeen (spailpin, itinerant labourer, a perfect Monaghan' (a clown. Dr Swift didn't elaborate).