An Irishman's Diary

THE LAST word on “mullocker” (maybe) goes to readers Tomás Ó Maonaile and Dan Collins. Both of whom make the argument that, with apologies to the Limerick shipping firm and other Mullocks of this world, the term “mullocker” – variously defined as a person who clears mining refuse, any manual labourer, or a large unskilled sportsman – may come from Irish.

Here’s what Tomás says: “I heard the original Irish language version of the word “Mullachán” from my father (a native Irish speaker) long before I heard the anglicised version. The two remained linked in my mind. Years later, out of curiosity I checked in Ó Donaill’s Irish-English dictionary. This confirmed what I believed: ‘Mullachán, 1.Round built-up heap. 2. ~ (gasúir), stout, strongly built boy’.” He further suggests that while the word may be apt to describe many rugby players, its original use would likely have been in Gaelic football, which is where he heard it in his younger days. Then, it was applied to a team-member more blessed with size than talent. Who would typically be positioned at full-forward to get in the way of, and generally frustrate, a good full-back.

Writes Tomás: “The mullachán was central to the principal (and probably only) tactic in gaelic football for many years, ie ‘Kick it in to the goalmouth’. While [he] rarely got possession of the ball, his skill (or lack thereof) caused plenty of confusion to the defence and excitement for the spectators. Sometimes there was even the added bonus of a melee.

“Sadly, for the most part, the day of the mullachán has passed, made redundant by higher levels of skill and fitness, and better football game tactics. However, [he] can occasionally still be found at Junior “B” level in some counties.”

Mullocker's derivation from Irish is at least a plausible theory, I agree, although it was not one of the many English-language colloquialisms repatriated to this country by US academic Daniel Cassidy in his 2007 book: How the Irish Invented Slang.

If Cassidy is to be believed, our first official language has spawned such popular words and phrases as “babe”, “baloney”, “boogaloo”, “bee’s knees”, “cop”, “dig”, “doozy”, “dude”, “geek”, “gee whiz”, “hokum”, “Holy Mackerel!”, “honky-tonk”, “Hot Diggity!”, “humdinger”, “jazz”, “jerk”, “punk”, “razzmatazz”, “scam”, “swanky”, “top banana”, and “twerp”, among many others.

But somehow, mullocker escaped his audit. Maybe, despite reaching Australia and New Zealand, the term never crossed the Atlantic.

CASSIDY’S BOOK was and remains controversial in linguistic circles because it bypassed the usual methodology for establishing word origins: tracing the first recorded references and then trying to explain why they occurred when and where they did.

To which criticism, the man himself could claim (he died in 2008, as the debate was only beginning) that his book was polemic as much as dictionary and that he was deliberately counterbalancing a cultural disregard for Irish by mainstream lexicographers.

There are, as his critics pointed out, many languages in the world and if you look hard enough, you can find phonetic coincidences for English words everywhere. But Cassidy was not the first to wonder why a nation that emigrated in such large numbers to anglophone countries, and that was famous for talking, had given as few words to its adopted language as the authorities suggested.

The writer HL Mencken, who was fascinated by American English, credited Irish emigrants with much influence on its pronunciation and speech patterns. He was puzzled, however, at the lack of loan terms: “Perhaps shillelah, colleen, spalpeen, smithereens and poteen exhaust the unmistakably Gaelic list”. With a collection of slang terms deemed of “origin unknown” in one hand and De Bhaldraithe’s English-Irish Dictionary in the other, Cassidy took it from there.

Irish is not unique, even in these islands, for its officially-supposed lack of influence on English. Welsh is also credited for only a handful of words: including, interestingly, “balderdash” and “flummery“; both synonyms for “nonsense”.

And if the disregard for Welsh was also due to cultural imperialism, insult was added to injury in the word “Welsh” itself. It is of course an Anglo-Saxon word, meaning “foreigner” or “slave”. On top of which libel, “to welsh” also became a verb meaning to renege on a bet.

This is in keeping with an old English tradition whereby the names of neighbouring nationalities are deployed as insults in themselves. Hence such phrases as “a bit Irish”. Or such medical conditions as “Spanish gout” (syphilis). Or the large number of dubious expressions qualified by the adjective “French“: ranging from “French ache” (syphilis again) to “French pigeon” (a pheasant shot illegally).

You’d think the Dutch, as a friendly neighbour, might have escaped this tendency. But no. That England and the Low Countries were enemies back in the 17th century is still witnessed by an extraordinary array of insults and euphemisms in which the prefix “Dutch” implies something bogus or inferior.

As for welshing on bets, there may even be a third layer of injustice to the land of valleys and male voice choirs. According to one theory, it was originally English bookmakers whose misdemeanours gave rise to the insult. The suggestion is that they sometimes fled their debts by crossing the Welsh border and then, like an unpaid hotel bill, left the phrase behind them.

* fmcnally@irishtimes.com