A German scholar who is working on aspects of Anglo-Irish literature in the 19th century sent me a note the other day about a term she found more than once in accounts of Dublin life, the Kentish Fire. She found this in the Morning Post of March 22nd, 1865: "During the overture that peculiar beating of the feet known as the Kentish fire was heard". Elucidate, she commands.
This Kentish Fire meant prolonged and organised applause, shown, not by bualadh bas, but by the means mentioned in the Post. The learned journal Notes and Queries of 1859 has this note: "The late Earl of Winchelsea . . . introduced into Ireland the `Kentish Fire'. The occasion was at a grand dinner given by the Protestants of Ireland on the fifteenth of August 1834, at Morrison's Hotel, Dublin, the day after the great Protestant meeting. When proposing the health of the chairman, Lord Winchelsea accompanied the toast with the Kentish Fire".
The Dublin Evening Mail was thrilled. It said in an editorial, "We can assure his lordship that neither his presence, nor the Kentish Fires which he was the first to kindle on this side of the Channel, will soon be forgotten."
But what was the origin of the term? Notes and Queries again, this time from 1856: "It dates back to the time when the question of Roman Catholic Emancipation was still unsettled. The fact is the Protestant cause was very strong in the county of Kent and the term derives from the cheers bestowed there by the No Popery orators in 18281829. Bualadh cos, if you like.
I met a former UCD colleague, Moore MacDowell, economist and classicist, on a sad occasion recently. Our conversation eventually took us to words and word origins, and we had a laugh at some of the folke tymologies one comes across.
Moore remembered that somebody wrote that butterfly is from flutter by. Its origin is more interesting and more complex. It is from the Old English buttorfleoge , a word found around 1000 in Aelfric. Compare the Dutch botervlieg and the modern German butter fliege.
But what connection has the insect, whose beauty has been proclaimed by poets in every language in Europe, with butter, you may ask? Well, Oxford points to a medieval Dutch synonym boterschijte which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement. Collins, while giving the Old English origin, says the name is perhaps based on a belief that the butterfly stole milk and butter. Take your pick.