An Irishman's Diary

‘IS BLUE the new black?” asked the headline on a recent blog entry by the BBC’s US correspondent.

He was writing about the film Avatarwhich, while making fortunes at the box office, has also set off a debate about racism.

Apparently some critics are irritated by its patronising portrayal of a blue-skinned race of noble savages, who need a white man to lead them against their (also-white) oppressors.

I haven't seen the film yet so (a) I can't comment and (b) I can't give away the plot (something for which fans of The Wire-on-DVD may be sarcastically grateful).

But the aforementioned headline reminded me of a quirk of Irish-language vocabulary, about which an American reader inquired recently. In this sense, the answer to the BBC man’s question is No. Far from being the new black, blue is the old one.

In Irish, “black person” is translated as “duine gorm”. Thus, in the mother tongue of at least one of his ancestors, Barack Obama’s skin colour would be described, technically, as “blue”.

This is not because he lived for many years in Chicago, and absorbed too much of that city’s musical vernacular: “na Gormacha”, as it’s known in Irish. But if the subject ever comes up in conversation with an African-American, that might be as safe an explanation as any.

In fact, as a potential source of international misunderstanding, the “duine gorm” controversy is a mild one. Certainly, it pales in comparison with another eccentricity of Irish: the notorious Frenchman/Francach issue.

It is embarrassingly the case that the Irish noun “Francach” means both “French person” and “rat”.

Worse still, concise versions of English-Irish dictionaries state this fact baldly and then just leave it at that, as if no explanation was required.

Whereas, as students of European history will know, it can sometimes be dangerous to cut such long stories short.

The Franco-Prussian War, you may recall, was deliberately precipitated by Bismarck when, spoiling for a fight with the French but wanting them to appear the aggressors, he released a slightly edited version of a telegram sent to him by his king, detailing a recent conversation with the French ambassador. Bismarck didn’t alter the facts. Like a good tabloid journalist, he just sharpened the telegram’s language a bit.

And within days, as he calculated, an outraged France declared war.

In the interests of diplomacy, therefore, I should explain that the unedited version of how Francach acquired its dual meaning is that (a) the rat is a relatively recent import into Ireland; (b) it arrived on Norman ships and was initially mistaken for a large mouse; (c) it was thus called the “luch francach”, meaning (more or less) the “French mouse”; and (d) the name was gradually shortened, until the adjective became the noun.

Even so, the fact remains that the only grammatical hint now of the word’s two different meanings is that “Francach” as in “Frenchman” takes a capital F; whereas “francach”, as in “rat”, does not.

In short, the term is a diplomatic incident waiting to happen.

Of course, and getting back to “duine gorm”, Irish has no monopoly on confusing words; even words relating to colour. Many languages do not have separate terms to differentiate between blue and green, for example. And English is no model of clarity in this field either.

Speaking of fields, consider another American musical form: “bluegrass”. It’s named after a plant found in places where that music flourishes. But is bluegrass blue? No, not really. It’s as green as any other grass, except when allowed to grow to full length, in which case it produces bluey-purple buds, so that a whole field of it might look blue from a distance, and if you scrunch your eyes up.

At least there’s a certain logic to that. Whereas, try explaining to your children why we say in English “red cheddar” when the cheese in question is orange; and “white cheddar” when it’s pale yellow.

Or, for that matter, why we say “black people” when we mean brown; and “white people” when, even in Nordic countries, the people in question are always at least faint shades of pink.

This brings me back to the BBC man’s question which, among other things, may be pointing to the wrong end of the spectrum.

The blue-skinned, nature-loving but helpless race portrayed in Avatarare not black in any sense, according to some critics.

No, these critics say, the real insult is to the indigenous peoples of the US. Native Americans, as they’re now known, or “red Indians” as they were once called, on account of being slightly more pink than their colonisers.