32 Divided by a Common Language, the Third
Posted by Christine on Jan 26, 2015 in Ireland | 0 comments 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...read more