32 Divided by a Common Language, the Third

I love encountering new-to-me slang words that have become so widely used and respectable they appear in the newspaper; though it must be said, Irish newspapers are more willing to use “language” than their American counterparts. An article in The Irish Times the other day said “the milk had a pong to it….” I had to look up “pong” used that way, though context did help. It means an offensive or bad odor, of course. And though the origin may be a Romani word “pan” meaning the same thing, you can imagine how a bad odor might pong like a ping-pong ball from the source to your nose. An expression I’ve heard in many contexts since living in Ireland—most notably from two scholars speaking as part of a Dublin History Festival panel on Ireland and Word War I—is “We made a hames of it.” As context suggests, it means “We made a mess of it,” but where does the word “hames” come from and how did this usage come to be? SpellCheck certainly doesn’t like the word, but it’s a legitimate thing. The Encyclopedia Britannica online explains it this way: “A hames collar is heavily padded; iron projections (hames) at its top contain eyepieces for the traces.” As the great-great granddaughter of an Irish born “master harness-maker,” I should probably have known that (see my blog post “12 Nicholas Cozzens, Co. Wexford, Ireland”). Michael Quinion in his fascinating blog “World Wide Words: Investigating the English language across the globe” has more to say about the word and the expression, but he and others note that the phrase “made a hames of it” is pretty much confined to Ireland. While the logical path from a feature of a horse collar to the meaning of the expression is a little meandering, you can see how important it would be NOT to mess up the way the traces attach to the horse’s collar via the hames: a mistake in this delicate operation could certainly lead to an accident and whoever harnessed the horse being charged with “making a hames of it.” A usage I have encountered frequently since coming to Ireland and enthusiastically incorporated into my own speaking is “deadly” meaning “really good” or “fantastic.” “What did you think of the pizza? “Deadly!” or “She’s a deadly fiddle player.” “Lethal” can be used in the same way. The word “dead” has long been associated with...
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31 At the Museum

I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, next door to Chicago, a city of world class museums. My parents, my aunt, and my elementary school would sometimes take me to visit the massive buildings on museum mile, but it wasn’t long before I was going regularly on my own, taking the “L,” walking along the lakefront and up one grand staircase or the other to wonder at the dinosaurs lurking in the lobby of the Field Museum, or to visit with American Gothic and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute, or to climb around on an actual German U-Boat at the Museum of Science and Industry. Background information about all of these things and what they meant would come in time. What mattered then was being in the presence of greatness and stretching my mind, in all its youthful ignorance, to try to make sense of what I was seeing. Only years later did I realize that not everyone lived in a museum city or had access to such vast collections of the world’s natural history, art, and science. Dublin is also a city of world-class museums, but Ireland’s national institutions have been struggling financially since the 2008 world crisis with no relief in sight. Every week the papers are full of the cutbacks and other indignities they’ve endured. When the head of the National Library of Ireland visited Emory University in Atlanta for a panel on Seamus Heaney in 2014, she told the audience that in spite of the exciting collection of Heaney materials donated by the poet shortly before his death, the NLI can barely afford to catalogue them, much less create an exhibit in the great poet’s honor. The National Museum of Ireland—including archeology and history at the Kildare Street location, natural history on Merrion Street Upper, decorative arts at Collins Barracks, and country life at Turlough in Co. Mayo—is considering reductions to hours, further cuts to staff, the closing of some sections or possibly the Mayo site, and the introduction of an admission fee. There’s been an outcry against charging admission, but that may be the only way to keep these important institutions running. It’s ironic that at a time of remembering and celebrating momentous historical events in Ireland’s history—the so-called decade of centenaries that began in 2012 with the hundred year anniversary of the Irish Home Rule Crisis—the museums...
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30 Fish and Chips

One of the best fish and chips shops in Ireland, Presto (established 1970) on South Lotts Road, is only steps from our apartment here in Dublin. And it’s not just me saying “best.” The Daily Edge (June 8, 2014) put it among the nineteen best places in the country (there are hundreds), and it’s usually included in top ten lists for Dublin and sometimes for all Ireland. We first heard about Presto from a taxi driver—Dublin taxi drivers are a great resource—though we probably would have tried it soon anyway. On the warm summer nights of our first few weeks in the city, the aroma of frying wafting out onto the street was too much to withstand. There are always customers lined up in the shop, and we often see cars illegally parked on the curb out front while the drivers dash in to pick up a phoned-in order—better recommendations than even a good Tripadvisor review. After one visit we were hooked. There’s another fish and chips shop a few hundred feet around the corner, but I know I’ll never try it. Why mess with perfection? Though haddock, hake, and plaice all have their devotees, for my money cod is the only way to go with fish and chips. Cod is more likely to be fresh than some of the others, too. There are various theories on what kind of oil should be used for the deep frying, but all agree that the fresh fish should be battered right before frying—absolutely no “pre-frying.” When I went to Presto to take photos, the staff made sure I witnessed each step of this process. The tenderness of the cooked fish and the crispy crust of the fried batter make the perfect mouthful. The chips must of course be thick cut from actual potatoes, not reconstituted mush as we often see in the US, and skin on or skin off as preferred. In Ireland the term “french fries” usually means thin, crispy potato pieces while “chips”—a word that goes back to Charles Dickens and beyond—is reserved for the thicker, softer, more substantial cut. Some restaurants serve both, but “fish and chips” always means the fat, succulent potato strips. As for accompaniments, I understand the appeal of malt vinegar, but I think tartar sauce–with its combination of creaminess and the zing of pickles–best contrasts the fried taste and crispiness. If you’ve ever tried deep fried pickles,...
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29 The Terrible Beauty of Patrick Pearse

Anyone visiting Ireland during the next two years is likely to encounter the young man depicted in the sculpture above, Patrick Henry Pearse (1879-1916)—a national icon and for some, almost a saint. Pearse, along with his younger brother Willie, was one of the “Sixteen Dead Men” eulogized by William Butler Yeats who were executed by the British under martial law following the Easter Rising in 1916. The Rising itself was judged a failure, but the executions of the sixteen leaders—poets, schoolteachers, shopkeepers, and a human rights leader among them—contributed to the transformation of public opinion about the possibility of finally achieving independence from Britain. Pearse was one of the insurrection’s leaders; Willie came along to support his brother but had no role in planning or carrying out the events of the week. His execution surprised everyone, including Patrick, who wrote in his last letter to his mother from prison that he thought that Willie was “not now in any danger.” Within six years of the executions, independence–or at least some measure of it– was achieved. Today, the Easter Rising is regarded as the seminal event in modern Irish history. Plans for the centenary commemoration in 2016 are already well under way—and already controversial, as have been past commemorations. Patrick Pearse’s image is everywhere in Ireland—on medals, on portraits in official buildings, on stamps and souvenirs. Even today, no schoolchild fails to learn his name or to connect him with heroism and the long struggle for independence. Yet for someone whose name is a household word, often spoken in hushed tones as his sacrifice is remembered and invoked, he is an enigmatic figure, both inspiring and troubling, someone whose motivations and ethos we may never fully understand. I encounter Patrick Pearse daily. I walk into town on Pearse Street (formerly Great Brunswick Street) past his birthplace and childhood home, which was also his father’s stonemasonry business, past Pearse Hardware, the Pearse Brasserie, Pearse Gardens, the Pearse Tavern, the Pearse Hotel, Pearse Square, Pearse Station—you get the idea. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear someone mentioning Pearse’s name or arguing about the significance of his actions. Letters to the editor in the newspapers debate the merits of the Rising and the role of Pearse and others in promoting “physical force nationalism” in Irish politics, a legacy that haunted the island during the Troubles and lingers even today, when relative peace reigns in both...
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