The Poetry Of My People.

The poetry of my people.

not to shill on main but

for all your good cow needs

interruption in Cbeebies programming when

Also big rec to check out Manchán Magan’s Instagram which has a tonne of definitions on it as well as his book Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape which this has just prompted me to take back off the shelf.

You can find a bunch more on his website here.

Sitting amid the bric-a-brac of generations of seafarers before him, fisherman and museum curator John Bhaba Jeaic Ó Confhaola of Galway, Ireland, tried to describe a word to interviewer Manchán Magan. The word, in the Irish language, was for a three-bladed knife on a long pole, used by generations of Galway fishermen to harvest kelp. Ó Confhaola dredged it from his memory: a scian coirlí. “I don’t think I’ve said that word out loud for 50 years,” he told Magan. It was a sentiment that Magan would hear again and again along Ireland’s west coast. This is a place shaped by proximity to the ocean: nothing stands between the sea and the country’s craggy, cliff-lined shores for roughly 3,000 kilometers, leaving it open to the raw breath of the North Atlantic. […] Early last year [2020], Magan […] began collecting coastal words from towns along the west coast, in an effort to preserve them. […] The recordings make up the Foclóir Farraige, or Sea Dictionary: an online database of recordings and definitions sorted by their regional origin. Magan also recently published a selection of words in an illustrated book. […]

Yet the words are often much more than utilitarian. They carry a sense of poetry, and a perspective on nature. There is the town of Donegal’s mada doininne, a particular type of dark cloud lining the horizon that foretells bad weather. The word, literally translated, means “hounds of the storm.”

Or bláth bán ar gharraí an iascaire, a description of choppy sea from the county of Galway that means “white flowers on the fisherman’s garden.” […]

A coastal Irish speaker, walking the beach at night, might have equally expected to hear stranach (the murmuring of water rushing from shore), or the whisper of caibleadh (distant spirit voices drifting in over the waves).

They knew the ceist an taibhse (the question for the ghost) – a riddle used to determine if someone they met along the way was human or supernatural.

Many words describe ways of predicting the weather, or fishing fortunes, by paying attention to birds or wind direction; to the sea’s sounds; or to the colors in a fire. […]

Ó Baoill and Magan both point out that preserving Ireland’s traditional coastal vocabulary is especially important in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. Take a word like borráite, from Carraroe village, which describes a rocky offshore reef found in the area. Kelp once grew on these reefs in abundance, tangling with other seaweed species and providing refuge for fish. Due to climate change and overfishing, however, Magan says that a borráite today would host neither kelp nor many fish.

“Contained within that word is the entire ecosystem that was in that area,” Magan says. Words like this, he hopes, can both remind us of what we have lost and reconnect us to what we might still preserve.

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Headline, captions, and text published by: Claudia Geib. “To Speak of the Sea in Irish.” Hakai Magazine. 17 March 2021. Published alongside illustrations and animations by Aurelie Beatley.

– Mary Ruefle, “Deconstruction”

CDTH SPOILERS will tag also but just so you’re warned

The use of the word Fenian in CDTH is so jarring to me. Like I’m sure she’s trying to invoke Fenian in the sense of a member of the Irish mythological Fianna ? But like... it’s unavoidably political as a word ?

I could delve into a better explanation of this but I’m currently in a doctor’s waiting room so have this Wikipedia explanation of the term.

Being associated with Boudicca as an organisation makes it weirder that it’s being used and isn’t political to me. (There are probably a host of reasons why Boudicca as a figure could also complicate this further, but I just mean in the barest sense of it being a shady dangerous group, not that they appear to be even remotely paramilitary in nature, which also adds to the weirdness)

I mean lbr here is a man who must have memories of being from Belfast during the Troubles as evidenced by his shared past with Niall discussed in Chapter 64:

And calls himself the New Fenian apolitically ? As a henchman of this group ?? So odd.

I mean the term even has specific American history too.

I just don’t think any of the reasoning behind this will touch upon any of the connotations/history of this in itself - I mean that’s absolutely not the point of CDTH, nor do I particularly think it should be. So just... why ? Is it just that it sounds like a cool rebel name ? If so that surely would be shrouded in the actual historical rebellion it’s linked to ? Being from Belfast when Niall would have been there, there is no way he’d be ignorant of the word or immune to its connotations, he wouldn’t use it without those being considerations, and I don’t know why he’d particularly want to in this context regardless of political leaning. Therefore: very strange.

Like generally when people are talking about the Fianna even you wouldn’t say “Fionn mac Cumhaill was a Fenian” you’d say he was a leader of the Fianna? Diarmuid Ua Duibhne - solider or member of the Fianna. Calling them Fenian would be weird. It’s still an extremely recognisable term today.

Anyway this is my off the cuff rambling as a confused Irish reader.