Strong Language – Frank McNally on ‘moithered’, ‘míle murder’, and the lesser-spotted ‘hecatomb’

A reader named Flaherty (I can’t quite make out the first name) writes to ask if I am familiar with the word “moithered”, which is popular in his/her family but not, s/he thinks, much used elsewhere in Ireland.

I am indeed familiar with it and have probably heard it deployed in the typical sense, as delivered by an exasperated mother to her children: “You have me moithered”.

But like many people, I also confuse it with a stronger word – murder – as pronounced in certain American accents.

This is partly the fault of an Italian-American boxer of the last century, “Two Ton” Tony Galento, who was from Noo Joisey (as he would have said it) and had a habit of threatening to “moider” his opponents (or as he preferred to call them, “bums”). A press agent’s dream, he was known for colourful quotations, many no doubt invented by the same press agents.

‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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In one of the more famous, hearing that his erudite fellow heavyweight Gene Tunney was an admirer of William Shakespeare, Galento supposedly said of the bard: “Never hoid of him. What is he, one of those foreign heavyweights? I’ll moider the bum.”

But “moithered” is a less violent word, meaning only “addled” or “confused”. And albeit spelled as “moidered”, it’s in Terry Dolan’s Hiberno-English dictionary, which ascribes it to English origin.

Sure enough, my correspondent traces the word’s popularity in his/her family to a great-grandmother whose own mother was from the English west midlands, or as the letter writer puts it, of “Salopian heritage”.

There’s one for a table quiz, by the way. Via the county’s former name, Salop, Salopian means “from Shropshire”.

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Writing about the word “clabber” recently (Diary, November 4th), I should have known better that to doubt it had ever featured in the work of a Nobel Prize winning poet. For of course it has, thanks to Seamus Heaney who, as noted in the same column, was also responsible for elevating another kind of muck, “glit”, into poetry.

Whereas WF Marshall, “the Bard of Tyrone”, versified clabber in its literal sense, via a poor farmer who was up to his knees in it, Heaney used it metaphorically in Poem (for Marie), to describe his emergence from the “sucking clabber” of childhood.

Marshall (1888-1959) was never likely to feature on short lists for the Nobel. Even so, he may have been an influence on the more illustrious Heaney, and not just in expanding his vocabulary of things mucky.

Readers may recall that, during the plague year of 2020, a line by Heaney – “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere” – was ubiquitous, quoted by Leo Varadkar and Nicola Sturgeon among others, and even appearing as graffiti.

But that was not from a Heaney poem, it was from a 1972 interview about the Troubles. And it was probably a conscious echo of a line from an old Marshall ballad about hiring fairs, complete with Ulster-Scots spelling:

“I wunthered in wee Robert’s/I can summer anywhere.”

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Getting back to where we started, or nearly, does anyone in Ireland commit “míle murder” anymore? Not literally, we hope, since the term implies a thousand homicides, all of them bilingual. But even in the figurative sense, as an exaggeration for “trouble” or “uproar”, I suspect the expression has died out. Dolan’s dictionary offers what was once a typical usage: “There’ll be míle murder when she comes home and finds the jug broken.” It also quotes an example from Joyce’s Ulysses, via the Citizen’s diatribe about corporal punishment in the British navy: “Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside of the poor lad till he yells meila murder.”

But speaking of metric measurements for implied slaughter, I’m also reminded of a word I learned only last year, when visiting the Paris apartment of an elderly and extremely learned US academic.

She was commenting on nothing more violent than the problems of subletting her place while away, and specifically on the failure of some tenants to water her plants. Thus, searching from a strong enough expression to describe the scene that greeted her on one return, she called it a “hecatomb”.

I nodded in grave sympathy as if familiar with this term but had to looked it up later to find that it derives from the Greek words for “hundred” and “ox”.

A hecatomb, therefore, was an ancient religious ceremony in which 100 cattle were sacrificed to heaven (we may soon see similar rituals in Ireland, as the Green Party seeks to appease the climate change gods, with similar effect).

Used to describe a deficit in plant watering, “hecatomb” makes “míle murder” sound like an understatement. But ever since hearing it, I’ve been hoping to work into a sentence somewhere. So forgive me readers, there it is.