Man of Many Colours – Frank McNally on the great lexicographer and eccentric, Sean the Coat

Before the word rothar became standard in Irish, the thing it described went by the more Homeric name of capall maide, or “wooden horse”. Adoption of the modern term is credited to a famous scholar from Dún Chaoin, Co Kerry, who had also introduced the first actual bicycle to his native Dingle peninsula.

Officially, he was Seán Óg Caomhánach. But as befits a man summarised by the Dictionary of Irish Biography as a “teacher, eccentric, and lexicographer”, he too had a colourful name which eventually, in a reverse of the bicycle experience, replaced the more prosaic one.

From the pubs of Kerry to the social columns of The Irish Times, and even in Dublin’s St Andrew’s College, a Presbyterian-run establishment where he taught for a period, he was known as Seán a’Chóta (“Sean the Coat”), or sometimes just “the Coat”.

One of his brothers, Muiris, also had a memorable nickname, earned in childhood during the second Boer War (1899-1902). Thanks to precociously vocal support for the president of Transvaal’s struggles against Britain, he was rebranded “Kruger” Kavanagh, a name that in time also became attached to his pub in Dunquin.

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A third brother, Séamus, would be distinguished in his own right as a professor of Celtic languages in UCC. But perhaps reflecting the sobriety of academia, he alone does not seem to have had a nickname.

Born in 1885, Sean the Coat grew up with an especially prodigious knowledge of the Irish dialect of Corca Dhuibhne, which he took with him on his bicycle travels around Ireland as a teacher with the Gaelic League. His Irish survived a period in America, from 1914 to 1922. Then he returned to take the republican side in the Civil War and be interned for a while in the Curragh's "Tintown", before teaching in Dublin.

But in 1935, he was commissioned by de Valera’s government to compile his definitive work, a dictionary of Irish as used on the Dingle peninsula. The project took seven years and the results reached epic proportions. Announcing its completion, this newspaper’s Irishman’s Diary declared the manuscript to “several feet high”.

Dispute had meanwhile arisen as to The Coat’s remuneration, which had been set at 40 shillings per thousand words. The question was whether this applied to “headwords” alone, or to the many quotations and examples with which they were elucidated.

The image of another wooden horse may now have come to the minds of sceptics, who included the acerbic Fine Gael TD for Monaghan, James Dillon. A hearing of the Oireachtas Committee of Public Accounts was told that the section on the letter "C" alone ran to 347,000 words.

Agreement on money was reached eventually, but the lexicographer never saw his work published as planned. The final manuscript ran to two million words in 29 volumes, of which at most 100 sets were ever expected to be sold.

So the manuscript went to the National Library, as a research resource, and remains there, complete with the author’s sign-off (translated here from the Irish): “Concluded on the 30th day of November, 1942, thanks be to God. Seán an Chóta.”

Like Risteárd Ó Foghludha, mentioned here earlier this week, Seán the Coat also features in Pádraigín Riggs's Dinneen and the Dictionary: The Life and the Afterlife, just published by the Irish Texts Society. He too had an annotated two-volume copy of Dinneen's epochal work. But unlike Ó Foghludha's, his notes are not marked by personal bitterness, and tend to provide mainly a "simple gloss" on the original.

The Coat’s eccentricities including regular appearances in a former staple of this newspaper: the social column wherein readers were informed on the latest movements of that part of Irish society that used to be known as “the quality”.

Typical (and actual) entries from 1943 include "Dr F.M. Hilliard has arrived in Dublin from England, and is staying at the Royal Hibernian Hotel" and "Mrs de Montmorency, who arrived in Dublin this week, has left for Co Kilkenny". Then there is this – "Seán A Chóta is at present staying at the Grand Hotel, Tralee" – one of several formal updates on his whereabouts.

The nickname, by the way, had nothing to do with overcoats or jackets. It is thought instead to have derived from “petticoat”, via the old tradition in Ireland of dressing smalls boys in girls’ clothing.

This may have continued longer than normal in his case, becoming a joke. But he was clearly proud of the name and, far from any lingering embarrassment about the delayed onset of trousers, he was also one of the hardcore nationalists of his era to champion the wearing by Irishmen of kilts.