Pardon my Irish – Frank McNally on rats, bats, and French-baiting

I was pleased to read somewhere recently about the discovery of a mineral previously unknown in natural form and now called Caseyite. It's a compound of aluminium and other things, found as mustard-yellow crystals in an old uranium mine in Colorado and was named after a professor of chemistry in California, Bill Casey, who had done a lot research on such material.

That’s the bit I was pleased about because Bill has been an occasional correspondent of this column over the years. Not about geology, but about another of his interests: the study of Irish. This was purely voluntary on his part. Unlike most of us, he was learning Irish (written only – he had no ambitions to speak it) for fun.

And it was in that spirit, 20 years ago, around the time of the Gulf War, he emailed me to wonder why, in this country’s first official language, we referred to people from one of our nearest neighbouring countries by the same word that means “rat”.

The country in question is the one we’re playing rugby against this weekend, to be exact. And it’s true. Dinneen’s Dictionary states the matter baldly. The word francach, it says, means “a rat; a Frenchman”.

Scotch Broth – Frank McNally on the case for repatriating the Book of Kells

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Love Storeys – Frank McNally on the eccentric but also romantic hotels of Paris

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Blanket Attack – Frank McNally on how James Joyce put the text in textiles (or vice versa)

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I of the beholder – Frank McNally on having an existential keyboard crisis

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As if to add to the insult, Dinneen goes on to use the construction "a rat prop." Happily, that is not a reference to any member of the French front row that Tadhg Furlong or Andrew Porter will face on Saturday. That "prop." is just short for "proper", I think.

And in fairness, Dinneen goes on to explain how francach is – a bit like Caseyite – the result of a compounding process. "A rat prop. is luch fhranncach", the dictionary says, meaning a "French mouse". Now undiplomatically abbreviated, the term is presumed to derive from the fact that, like much of our wildlife, the rat is not native to Ireland and its arrival was attributed to ships from Normandy.

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Among my possessions, thanks to the same Bill Casey, are a couple of baseballs, lightly stained with Californian grass. They were among many that used to come across a fence near where he worked, so he posted me a pair as a souvenir. I’m not sure if the man himself has ever stepped up to the plate. But I do know that a fictional namesake of his is the most famous baseball player in American literature.

Written in 1888, the comic ballad “Casey at the Bat” describes a climactic moment in the life of a time called Mudville, when their slim hopes of victory fall on the hero of the title.

Its composer was one Ernest Thayer and it was first published in San Francisco.

But Thayer was a Harvard man from western Massachusetts. That and other things have set up a long-standing rivalry been there and California for possible, real-life protagonists for Casey and Mudville, a Mike “King” Kelly being one of the lead suspects.

Anyway, given the enormous popularity it once enjoyed in music halls, the interesting thing about the poem is its cynicism. It sets up a heroic conclusion as, with bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, Casey calmly passes up on the first two deliveries as unsuitable. He then has no choice but to swing hard at the third. Thus the poem’s epic conclusion:

“Oh somewhere in this favoured land/The sun is shining bright;/the band is playing somewhere, and/somewhere hearts are light/And somewhere men are laughing/And somewhere children shout;/but there is no joy in Mudville –/Mighty Casey has struck out.”

For those of you who don't speak American, I should explain that having "bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth" means, more or less, being where Ireland were in Paris three years ago, just before Johnny Sexton attempted the long-distance drop. As for Casey having "struck out", that means that, unlike Sexton, he missed.

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There are no Rats, or even Prats (a famous French rugby name) playing in Paris on Saturday. But reminding us that Irish has no monopoly on undiplomatic terms, there will be at least one Cretin in the French 23. The name derives from Chrétien, meaning Christian. Via a once-notorious medical condition caused by insufficient thyroid hormone, however, it evolved to become a term of abuse in English.

Cretinism, as the condition is no longer called, caused both physical and mental underdevelopment, including inability to speak. It was once very prevalent in mountainous parts of France, apparently because of lack of iodine in the water. There are competing theories for how the name derived. The most persuasive is that the afflicted were called "Christian" because, in their child-like simplicity, they lacked the ability to sin.