Cutting through Dublin’s Trinity College one night a while ago, I stopped to watch a rugby match alongside a man who, every so often, shouted: “Come on, College!”
At first I assumed he was cheering for the home team. Then, thanks to a combination of his posh Cork accent and events on the field, it emerged that he was up for the away side: UCC.
In this fixture, it seemed, they were the only “College”, maybe because the home side was officially “Dublin University”.
The confusion was added to, for me, because “College” (or “the College”) is my old family nickname, inherited from generations ago when the paternal homestead in South Monaghan shared the location of a hedge-school.
In the name of the father – Frank McNally on the waning tradition of family nicknames
Princess Margaret’s Galway island visit: ‘By the cut of you, you’re a lady. Will you take a drink?’
Saoirse Ronan has died only six times, Liam Neeson 31
Power ballad – Frank McNally on the case for an Irish ‘Wichita Lineman’
Hearing a man shout “come on College”, therefore, was a near-Proustian moment.
Unwittingly, he sent me back to childhood football fields, albeit that the shouts there may have been less encouraging and delivered in vaguely threatening drumlin accents rather than the soft lilt of St Luke’s, or wherever your man was from.
I was reminded of this by a recent story on the BBC website about how our ethnic cousins, the Scots, are at risk of losing their traditional nicknames to modernity.
As in Ireland, the dominance of certain surnames in the same localities of Scotland, especially the western isles, used to require the addition of such informal identity tags.
There as here, they had two types: the patronymic, in which parents and grandparents’ names were added; and shorter, more colourful nicknames, inspired by appearance, habits, or chance events and circumstances, like our hedge-school.
Both are now in danger of dying out, the BBC reports, partly because of the relentless spread of English in the highlands and islands.
I suppose the old nicknames are on the way out here too, for various reasons. But an Irish Times colleague, Una McCaffrey – it was she who drew my attention to the BBC story – is herself the inheritor of a classic Gaelic patronymic, which can still be produced on occasion, like the good china.
In her father’s native Clogher, Co Tyrone, the surname was widespread. So to avoid confusion, they became the “James Eoin” (pronounced to rhyme with “coin”) branch. And from there, the identity tags multiplied. Given her full list of honorifics now, my colleague is Una Fay (from her father) Barney (from his father) James Eoin McCaffrey.
Both this native tradition and the colonialism by which it was discouraged are famously lampooned in Myles na gCopaleen’s Gaeltacht satire An Béal Bocht, aka The Poor Mouth.
On his first day at school, the book’s seven-year-old narrator is asked in a foreign language (English) for his name. After finally understanding the question, he attempts to answer it: “Bonaparte, son of Michelangelo, son of Peter, son of Owen, son of Thomas’s Sarah, grand-daughter of John’s Mary, grand-daughter of James, son of Dermot . . .”
Alas, before he can get any further with the epic lineage, a psychopathic teacher cracks his head open with an “oar” and announces that, henceforth: “Yer nam is Jams O’Donnell!”. By the end of the day, everyone in class goes home with identical English names and skull fractures.
Patronymic nicknames were relatively rare where I grew up, for whatever reason. Hence my confusion at the funeral there some years ago of a man I had always known only as Packie Richards. In fact, it was mainly his son, Gerry Richards, I knew.
But I was late for the Mass and so stood at the back of the church, from where I was perturbed to hear the priest refer repeatedly to the deceased as “Patrick Callan”.
This led me to fear I was at the wrong funeral, a suspicion not allayed by struggles to identify other mourners from the backs of their heads. Only when the funeral ended and I could ask someone did I finally learn that Callan had always been the family surname. “Richard’s” (complete, as I now also realised, with a possessive apostrophe) was a patronymic addition.
The other kinds of nickname were common in our neighbourhood. From a quick trawl of memory, there was a “Boss”, a “Yankee”, “Pipes”, “Mick Miley”, “Wee Mick,” and “Slasher”, among others.
A friend called Tom McEnaney, now also exiled in Dublin, tells me that his family were known as the “Tailors” but he doesn’t know why: there was no tailoring by the time he came along.
This reminds me that our locality also used to have a family called the “High Pockets”.
Nobody now seems to know the origin of that either. Did some distant ancestor make a bold fashion statement once that was instantly immortalised? Perhaps the Tailor McEnaneys were involved.
In a 1953 essay called “A Poet’s Country”, our local poet Patrick Kavanagh eulogised the power of such names to bring his native place to mind. One of his neighbours, for example, was known as “Smell Bacon”, something Kavanagh thought no novelist could invent.
“How hopeless are the nicknames that one finds in fiction,” he wrote. “Smell Bacon is a real ballad nickname, flat and surprising like the names in American folksongs. [Those] are never poetical, which means that they are poetry.”
