It’s just as well that Myles na gCopaleen was not alive to hear Micheál Martin call Dinneen’s Dictionary “the gold standard” while appealing to its supposed clarity in that Dáil row about the meaning of words. The resultant fit of apoplexy might have killed him.
Eighty years ago, Myles blamed the same publication for his decision to stop writing columns in Irish.
‘Far from clarity, he alleged, the multiplicity of hitherto unsuspected meanings attributed by the dictionary to even simple Irish terms meant you couldn’t trust the language anymore.
Here he is, describing the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The Times they are a-name-checking – Frank McNally on songs about newspapers
Lexicographer at Large – Frank McNally on Dinneen’s Dictionary and the Dáil row about unparliamentary Irish
For Whom the Bells Toll – Frank McNally on the ups and downs of “sound baths”
All fired up – Ita O’Kelly on keeping the homes fires burning
“The Irish lexicographer Dinneen, considered in vacuo is, heaven knows, funny enough. He keeps standing on his head, denying stoutly that piléar means bullet and asserting that it means ‘an inert thing or person’. Nothing stumps him. He will promise the sun, moon, and stars to anybody who will catch him out. And well he may.
“Just take the sun, moon, and stars for a moment. Sun, you say, is grian. Dinneen shouts that grian is ‘the bottom (of a lake, well).’ You are a bit nettled and mutter that, anyway, gealach means moon. Wrong again. Gealach means ‘the white circle in a slice of a half-boiled potato, turnip, etc.’ In a bored voice, he adds that réalta (of course) means ‘a mark on the forehead of a beast’. Most remarkable man. Eclectic I think is the word.”
Hence Myles’s decision, or so he said, to abandon the first official language circa 1943 and henceforth, in his Cruiskeen Lawn column, stick exclusively to the second:
“That, of course, is why I no longer write Irish. No damn fear. I didn’t come down in the last shower. Call me a bit fastidious if you like but I like to have some idea what I’m writing. Libel, you know. One must be careful. If I write in Irish what I conceive to be ‘Last Tuesday was very wet’, I like to feel reasonably sure that what I’ve written does not in fact mean ‘Mr So-and-So is a thief and a drunkard’.”
It’s possible the great satirist was exaggerating a little here. In fact, whatever about saying it of Mary Lou McDonald, the Taoiseach might be on safer ground claiming that Myles na gCopaleen was “ag insint bréaga” and that the real reason for abandoning bilingualism was that he wanted more people to read him.
In any case, ironically, the endless nuance of Dinneen’s Irish drove Myles to extraordinary flights of English when lampooning him, as in this supposed, multi-layered definition of a random word:
“Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. – act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badger’s suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprechaun’s denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake’s clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman’s dumpling, a beetle’s faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man’s curse, a ‘kur’, a fiddler’s occupational disease, a fairy godmother’s father, a hawk’s vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle’s ‘farm’, a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat’s stomach-pump, a broken ---”
Mind you, Myles was adept at having it both ways when it suited. At least before Dinneen sapped his confidence about what Irish words meant, the columnist was also capable of attributing a “steely, latinistic” exactitude to the language, of which English was incapable.
By way of illustration, he made this literal translation of a 17th-century letter, written in Gaelic by Hugh O’Neill to a dubious ally:
“Our blessing to ye, O Mac Coghlin: we received your letter and what we understand from her is that what you are at the doing of is but sweetness of word and spinning out of time. For our part of the subject, whatever person is not with us and will not wear himself out in the interest of justice, that person we understand to be a person against us. For that reason, in each place in which ye do your own good, pray do also our ill to the fullest extent ye can and we will do your ill to the absolute utmost of our ability, with God’s will. We being at Knockdoney Hill, 6 februarii, 1600.”
As Myles commented: “This seems to me to be an exceptional achievement in the sphere or written nastiness and the original exudes the charm attaching to all instances of complete precision in the use of words.”
But that, he might have added, was before Dinneen came along with his Irish-English dictionary, after which nothing was ever clear again.
