REVIEWING MY postbag after a week away, I was particularly drawn to an e-mail addressed from Hell Street, Co Louth, writes FRANK McNALLY.
Readers may recall that I mentioned this place-name in a recent column about Terence Dooley's fine book The Murders at Wildgoose Lodge: events described in which happened a few miles from where I grew up.
My theory was that the local nickname “Hell Street” – on a laneway a few hundred yards from where the lodge stood – derived from the grim events of October 1816. But now the Hell Street residents’ committee, or at any rate a man called Jim McArt, who lives on the lane, has written to say otherwise.
Jim seems to know what he’s talking about. His family has lived in the area for “around 250 years”. Not only that, his great-grandfather was – like the unfortunate Edward Lynch – a tenant on the Filgate estate, and was one of a group who stood guard on the lodge after the initial raid there in April 1816 and Lynch’s subsequent complaint to the authorities.
Having established his impeccable credentials, Jim says that, despite its proximity to the infamous burning, Hell Street did not get the title from any role in that event.
“[It] was named thus by the landlord Filgate because he spent so much time adjudicating on petty differences among his tenants there in an overcrowded row of hovels. It is said that at one stage Filgate was so fed up of being called upon by the lane residents for every little dispute that he said in exasperation, “You live in a veritable Hell Street over there!” and the name stuck.”
Thanks for that, Jim. It sounds like a plausible enough explanation, all right, and I am more than happy to set the record straight. I just hope my original explanation has not had a detrimental effect on Hell Street’s property prices.
On a rather different subject, but also from Louth, comes a letter that causes me to hang my head in shame. It appears that in a putative extract from my equally putative GAA-based Mills and Boon novel, published elsewhere in this paper recently, I misspelt the romantic hero’s name as “Tadgh”.
Administering six of the best and inviting me to stand in the corner of the classroom, one KWS Kane from Castlebellingham explains the correct spelling of this venerable Irish name: “To render the letter ‘D’ silent requires the addition thereto of an “H”. The letter “G”, being hard, does not require an “H”. Thus the correct spelling is “Tadhg”, as would be obvious to anyone with any understanding of Irish.” Ouch.
As KWS Kane no doubt knows, along with being “silent” and “aspirated”, letters in Irish can also sometimes be “mortified”. And all I can say is, I am at least as mortified as they are. My apologies to Tadhgs everywhere.
In a lighter vein – and mercifully not on the subject of my mistakes – is an e-mail from confused reader Tim Jackson, drawing attention to a quotation in the sports pages recently attributed to IFRU spokesman Philip Browne.
Mr Browne was ruling out the continued use of Croke Park for rugby internationals once the new Lansdowne Road opens, on the grounds that this would be unfair to businesses contracted to the latter stadium.
But what he said was this: “We start taking them [ie. the rugby internationals] out and it affects their [ie. the businesses’] bottom line, it affects their ability to make their contract workable and it affects the ability of the stadium [. . .] to actually wash its face on an annual basis.”
Like Tim, I was momentarily puzzled as to what the bit about face-washing meant – especially since the word “actually” seemed to rule out any figurative significance.
Was it perhaps a hint about the identity of the company that had won naming rights for the new Lansdowne: a company that would require a giant face logo on the front of the stadium as part of any deal? One imagined the Ronald McDonald Superdome, crowned by a 200-foot-high clown’s head, the annual cleaning bill for which would be considerable. Or the Nivea for Men Stadium, fronted by a giant pin-up of Brian O’Driscoll’s smiling features, regular steam-washing of which would be essential to ensure that no blackheads or other blemishes accrued.
But no. It appears that – “actually” notwithstanding – the phrase was just a figure of speech after all. In business jargon, to “wash your face” means to break even.
So I think what Mr Browne was saying is that the new Lansdowne will need a full line-up of internationals, going forward, if it is to keep its bottom line wiped.
Finally, I can only agree with several readers who have pointed out that no entry in the diary’s recent long-running series on people with amusingly apt names can possibly top the fact that the perpetrator of one of the greatest financial frauds in history has a surname pronounced “Made-off”.
Even so, one further e-mail on the topic is worth mentioning. Its brevity confused me at first. “I have nothing to say on the subject of funny names,” it read in full. Then I noticed the signature: “Enda Storey.”