Last week, Patricia Quinn, director of the Arts Council, presented three literary awards and the Council's annual bursaries to writers at a shindig in Dublin's Merrion Hotel. It was a day for poets, with three taking all of the major awards. John F. Deane received the Marten Toonder Award, which honours established artists (£7,875); Liam ╙ Muirthile was garlanded for the best book of new Irish-language poetry (£3,150); and Paula Meehan got the Denis Devlin Award for the best book of English-language poetry in the last three years (£1,968). Those who received bursaries were: Leo Cullen, Trevor Joyce, Vona Groarke, Enda Wyley, Helen Blackhurst, Siofra O'Donovan, Matthew Sweeney, Fred Johnston, Seβn MacMath·na, Pβdraig ╙ Ciobhβin, Claire E. Dagger and Liam Mac Uistin.
Words are the jigsaw pieces which allow us to form sentences, conversations, poems, books, articles. An unusual word can transform a sentence and make us think again about the way something is said, pushing out boundaries of expression and meaning. And also creating some fun along the way.
Oxford University Press has brought out a new dictionary, The Dictionary of Weird and Wonderful Words, and Sadbh has been sent a little booklet with a sample of definitions from the book. Weird and wonderful indeed they are. One which may interest our friends in Kildare Street is snollygoster, a shrewd or unprincipled person, especially a politician. This one has a speculative origin in the name given to a mythical monster in 19th-century Maryland, supposedly invented to terrify former slaves and stop them from voting. Ever wondered why a certain Australian ex-soap star-turned-singer keeps coming back on the scene, long after she should technically have passed her sell-by date? Well, Kylie is an Australian word for boomerang. Seen any dandiprats lately? That be the 16th-century term for a young, insignificant person: the latter part of the word would seem to be still in currency to describe what might be termed an idiot. A use could also be found for blatherskite, a person who talks at length without making much sense. Indeed, if you were a winebibber, you could also run the danger of being a blatherskite: a winebibber is a person who drinks a lot of alcohol.
The postbag received by the books department never fails to astonish Sadbh. Week after week, sackloads of mail come into the office, covering topics mainstream, downstream, and frankly out at sea. Sadbh's eye was caught by a couple of books in particular this week: A Charmed Life, the Spirituality of Potterworld by Francis Bridger, published by Darton, Longman and Todd; and Protestant Women's Narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, edited by John D. Beatty and published by Four Courts.
Sadbh's first thought was that the Potterworld book was a joke, but no, it contains such weighty-sounding chapters as "The Metaphysics of Potterworld" and "The Moral Universe of Potterworld". Sadbh dipped in, but remains baffled as to who exactly this bizarre book is aimed at. The merchandise associated with the Harry Potter books doesn't seem to be confined simply to lunchboxes and posters: there also seems to be this spate of oddball books which go off in lightning-shaped tangents in the hope of tapping into the phenomenally large readership of the books themselves.
In contrast, the true narratives told by the Protestant women of 1798 seem almost fictional. The diaries and letters of women of the privileged social classes - who had plenty of time to be scribing - have long offered intriguing insights into the details of the past, as well as the broader picture. Thence Maria Edgeworth's first-hand account of the divisions within the Protestant community at that time. She records a night of celebrations and rioting in Longford, in which her father was temporarily captured. The previous victory celebrations had prompted the women of Longford to place candles in the windows, set into turnips and potatoes, a domestic detail that only a woman would have noticed.
Sadbh is keen on the esoteric and was intrigued to read this week of Britain's annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year. There are six wilfully obscure titles in the running this year. They are: The Art and Craft of Pounding Flowers: No Paint, No Ink, Just a Hammer! (QVC); Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service (Butterworths); Fancy Coffins To Make Yourself (Schiffer); The Flat-Footed Flies of Europe (Brill); Lightweight Sandwich Construction (Blackwell Science); and Tea Bag Folding (Search Press). The prize has been around a long time: it was awarded to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (University of Tokyo Press) in 1978.