Tinteán

by Dymphna Lonergan

From September to December this year in Australia, you can see a stage adaptation of the acclaimed novel The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. The novel is an account of a young girl’s effort save words that had been excluded by the first Oxford English Dictionary compilers in 1886. The novel begins with Esme Nicoll hiding under the dictionary sorting table at the time that words to be included in the dictionaries are being compiled. She picks up a piece of paper that has fallen from the table and notes the word: ‘bondmaid’. Over time, Esme collects more and more of these unwanted or discarded words. She concludes that certain words are not being included in dictionaries because they are compiled by middle-class white men who are biased against women and people of a lower class.

I had my own Esme experience of sorts during my research into Irish words in Australian English. My research interest for a long time has been the occurrence of Irish language words in English. I questioned why an Irish writer would use them when there were equivalent English language words, and I set out to collect them and analyse their use in novels written by Irish writers. I followed this research with one on the Irish language in Australia and Irish language words used by Australian writers.

My first experience of an ‘attitude’ by lexicographers towards Irish language words was in examining the etymology attributed to words of Irish origin in the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition). Here, I found ‘Anglo-Irish from Irish’ given as the etymology of some Irish language words, while others were given the etymology of ‘Irish’. For example, the word colleen (Ir. cailín, a girl) was noted as being of ‘Anglo-Irish’ origin, but the word mavourneen (Ir. mo mhúirnín, my darling), was noted as being of ‘Irish’ origin. To me, the Irish language word described as ‘Anglo-Irish from Ir.’ diminished or obscured the Irish language: ‘Anglo’ coming first, and the implication that its Irish language status was no longer important.

A counterargument made to me at the time was that the word colleen was chiefly in use in the dialect of English found in Ireland and therefore the term Anglo-Irish was appropriate. My returning argument was that the word café or any other French word used in English was not described as Anglo-French from Fr. in dictionaries. Its etymology is always noted as purely Fr. All Irish language words should be described as such: Ir. should be the term used for the word’s etymology in the dictionary. Fortunately, these discrepancies in Irish language words have been addressed in the online OED and the term for the dialect of English found in Ireland is now more likely to be described as Irish-English than Anglo-Irish.

Is there bias in dictionary compiling? Ultimately, yes. Dictionaries are compiled according criteria. Before the internet, the number of words in a dictionary might be limited because of cost, but the criteria may also include the need for evidence such as the number of times the word has occurred in print. This is understandable. During my research I found that three occurrences of a word in print was a minimum requirement for a word to be included in a dictionary. This may be what happened to Pip Williams’ word bondmaid as discussed in the novel. However, the word bondmaid has not been lost. It can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary online with entries from the sixteenth century.

Researching the Irish language in Australia, I was interested to see if Irish language words had made their way into Australian English. Having trawled through all available dictionaries in libraries (this was before online dictionaries), I headed off to Canberra on a research trip to see if I could find more of my words at The Australian National Dictionary Centre, a dictionary that, like the OED, used historical citing that would help me to estimate the period of time an Irish word was in use in Australia.

Arriving at the Centre, I was given free rein to look at the collection of cards in filing cabinets containing the words that had made up the Australian National Dictionary. These were recorded on cards sent in by readers who were volunteer word collectors for the Centre. I was struck by the dedication of these volunteers whose handwritten entries were set out with the required details: name of source, author, page number. These were duly posted or handed in and later filed. This volunteer work has always been central to dictionary making. Australia’s earliest dictionary was a collection of English slang words compiled by convict James Hardy Vaux in 1812. In England, an asylum inmate collected over a thousands words for the first Oxford English Dictionary. This story was told by Simon Winchester in his book The Professor and the Madman (2016).

Fág a Bealach Clear the Way

Lunchtime arrived, and I went into the tearoom to make myself a cuppa. In the corner of the tearoom I spied two more filing cabinets. As I approached them, I could see that they were labelled ‘Rejects’. I have always been attracted to the obscure, the different, the unique, and I suspected that Irish language words might be found here in the Rejects filing cabinets. These words may not have met the number requirement. We usually think of the word unique as meaning ‘special’ but also a ‘one-off’, and in this Centre a one-off is not special enough to be included in the dictionary. Here, a one-off is a reject. But not by me.

Here, I found cards showing Faugh-a-ballahs cited in William Howitt’s Land, Labor and Gold: or Two Years in Victoria (1855). Howitt says that it is a name given to thieves. I was excited to see this term in use in Australia. The term is an anglicised version of the Irish war cry Fág an bealach! Clear the way! Howitt’s thieves may have been an organised gang such as bushrangers. The term was on the banner of Irish regiments in the American Civil War (look sideways on the above image below the insignia). It is used as a chapter heading in Thomas Keneally’s novel The Great Shame (1998), but that just makes two recorded entries. I continued my search resigned to the commonsense approach in dictionary-making that three entries were required for a word to be included in the dictionary and that faugh-a-ballahs and Faugh-a-ballagh must be rejected. I did find number three later in the course of my own research, but alas, too late.

Dúidín a short clay pipe

My resignation soon changed, though, when I found the word dudeen lying in one of the Reject filing cabinets, with five entry cards to its credit. Whatever about fág a bealach not qualifying for an Australian English dictionary, there is no doubt that the dudeen, a short clay pipe – Irish dúidín – is worthy of a dictionary entry given how it was part of the distinctive look of the colonial male. The cards in the Reject file showed that the word occurs in James Tucker’s novel Ralph Rashleigh (1845) as dhudeen; in Alexander Harris’s Settlers and Convicts (1847) as dudeen – ‘…and the dudeen…was in everybody’s mouth’; in John Henderson’s Excursions and Adventures in New South Wales (1851) as dudun; in William Kelly’s Life in Victoria (1859) as dudheen; and in Thomas Keneally’s The Great Shame (1998) as dudeens.

As the rest of the staff was out to lunch, the only person left for me to complain to was a student who was working in the Centre. I was explaining the importance of the dúidín in early Australian settler culture, and how it met the occurrences requirement with at least five entries, when he suddenly blurted out, ‘But it’s only a pipe! It’s not a word like Federation.’ With that, I felt the might of an imperialistic giant foot squashing my small Irish ego. Fág a bealach, I said to myself as I exited the tearoom.

Eventually, I was able to tell the story of the Irish language word dúidín and other Irish words in Australian English in my book Sounds Irish (2004). Pip Williams’ Dictionary of Lost Words has also cleared the way, capturing more unique and special words in English that carry stories of presences that should not be forgotten.

Dymphna Lonergan is a member of the Tinteán editorial collective and is retired with academic status from Flinders University. Her book Sounds Irish: the Irish Language in Australia (2004) includes a Glossary of the Irish language words she found in Australian writing. Irish words in use in Irish writing, She contributed a chapter to Ireland’s Lexical Memory, University of Sydney Press, 2020 titled ‘Irish words in English Language Texts’ 1800-2016’. Since retirement, she has been writing Irish language short stories with English translations: As Gaeilge (2022) and Scéalta Eile (2023)