An Irishman's Diary

CRUISING what used to be known as the “information super-highway” recently, I took a wrong turn at an intersection somewhere and, before I knew it, found myself in a rather strange part of town: to wit, the website of one “Dr Betty Martin”.

Betty (we’ve never spoken, but somehow I feel I know her well enough now to use her first name) is a Seattle-based chiropractor. Or, as she herself puts it on the website: “a chiropractor, Body Electric School-trained Sacred Intimate, Certified Sexological Body Worker, Foundations of Facilitation trainer, and self-propelled erotic adventurer and intimacy coach”.

That’s a lot for readers to absorb, I know. But essentially, in the woman’s own summary, all these skills can be reduced to one, unifying concept: “professional touch”.

Fortunately for Betty, she grew up in hippy-era America, where touching was popular in roughly-inverse proportion to getting a hair-cut. So she had a head start on her chosen career. Then she “got serious” and attended chiropractic school, where she “learned to touch with clear intent”.

Most of her activities these days are “hands-on” (for obvious reasons).

But her commitment to tactile causes extends to board membership of the “Association of Sexual Energy Professionals”. And intriguingly, she’s also on the board of something called “Cuddle Party”, whose “facilitators” she helps train.

I followed the link here too and discovered that Cuddle Party is a self-described international movement organising events in which adults meet and touch each other, one to one or in groups.

Which was all very interesting. And yet, somehow, after hanging around Dr Betty’s and the Cuddle Party’s websites for a while, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. It was probably the well-known Irish dread of being hugged, even over the internet. In any case I made my excuses, contacted the Google search engine emergency rescue line, and was soon safely back on the highway.

THE TRUTH, I swear, is that I had only been searching for the origins of a phrase. An old English phrase, namely: “all my eye and Betty Martin”.

It means “complete nonsense”, more or less. And as such it was once popular, but is now rarely used and in danger of extinction.

I first came across the expression in the columns of Myles na gCopaleen.

And since there was something inherently funny about it, I thought he’d invented it himself. But on the contrary, it has featured in the English language since at least the 18th century. And for most of that time, it has also been puzzling etymologists.

A shorter version, “all my eye”, is still common currency. It’s also older, going back the mid-1700s at least. Only around the 1780s was “and Betty Martin” added, for increased emphasis. So if there was a real-life Betty, she must have achieved notoriety around then, before the reasons for her fame vanished back into obscurity.

In their continued absence, some very fanciful theories have been advanced to explain the phrase. An 1823 dictionary of sporting slang suggested it was the corruption of a Latin prayer, “O mihi, beate Martine” (“Pray for me, blessed Martin”): presumably directed at St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of reformed drunks.

No trace of such a prayer has been found anywhere else, however. So attractive as it is, that explanation may itself be all my eye.

An even more exotic theory, from the 20th century, gave the phrase Phoenician origins. In this context, it was “O mihi, Britomartis”: Britomartis being a goddess of ancient Crete. According the theory, the expression imploring her help might have travelled to Britain with the Phoenicians who imported tin from Cornwall. But nobody seriously believes that.

Since one of the first recorded instances of the phrase was in a letter from a royal navy captain, yet another possibility is that – like umpteen other English expressions, from “Sweet Fanny Adams” to “Son of a gun” – this one had origins in sea-faring. If it did, no one seems to know, and since the phrase is dying out, we’ll hardly find out now.

ONLY UNKIND CRITICS and haphephobics (those with an irrational fear of being touched) would suggest that the aforementioned Dr Betty is giving the old a phrase a new lease of life. But if it was Myles na gCopaleen who indirectly referred me to her, she in her turn sent me back to him – or to his real-life persona Brian O’Nolan – and another phrase he was wont to use.

O’Nolan was himself a haphephobe: if only in a narrow, Irish sense of the term. Specifically, he was very intolerant of those who, especially in pubs, couldn’t pay their own way. One such person was his friend (most of the time) and fellow writer Patrick Kavanagh. And the rather harsh sobriquet O’Nolan applied to him on such occasions was the “Monaghan toucher”.

This is probably the only form of touching in which even Dr Betty might have to admit not being an expert. I’m unsure whether the usage is uniquely Irish, but I suspect most Americans wouldn’t know what it means. That said, Kavanagh could perhaps be said to have shared at least some of Dr Betty’s professional expertise. Like her, I suppose, he did sometimes touch people for money.