Your starter for 10: What have Emily Brontë - 160 years dead this week, but assured of literary immortality - and half the GAA pitches of Ulster got in common? No, it's not their association with dark, violent passions, as portrayed both in Wuthering Heightsand in reports of last Sunday's senior club football final in Enniskillen, won by Crossmaglen; although, now that you mention it, there is that too, writes Frank McNally.
But what I really had in mind was a surname. To wit: many latter-day northern GAA pitches, including Enniskillen's Brewster Park, are the work of a man called "Prunty". And so, in a sense, was Emily.
From the Irish Ó Proinntigh, the anglicised name lends itself better to soil mechanics than it does to literature. No doubt Joe Pat Prunty's success, first in agricultural drainage and subsequently in the construction of playing surfaces, is due mainly to his products' durability in stormy conditions (or "wuthering", as they say in Yorkshire).
But the brand has been given an extra competitive edge by a happy accident of alliteration that readily springs to the modern GAA supporter's lips. Admire the mid-winter surface of a football field in Crosserlough (Cavan), or Maguiresbridge (Fermanagh), or the aptly named Aghabog (Monaghan) and the man next to you will probably explain it in two words that have become synonymous with any club's progressiveness. It's a "Prunty pitch", he will say, before telling you proudly just how much it cost.
Whether the name would have been as successful in a literary context is at least questionable. No doubt we would have grown used to it by now. But in the 16 decades since Emily Brontë's death, her father's exotic respelling - a little piece of the Mediterranean transplanted to the north of England where he would rear his tragic family - has become so much a part of her image as to seem inseparable.
Not that it was much use to her in life. To escape the contemporary prejudice against female novelists, she and her sisters wrote under the prosaic surnom-de-plume of Bell, with androgynous forenames. And it was as Ellis Bell that Emily enjoyed modest success before dying, aged 30. It would be years later before the romantic Brontë legend took off.
Biographers differ on why Patrick Prunty/Brunty (the forms were interchangeable) rebranded himself. One explanation is that, among his apprenticeships, he had served time as a blacksmith. He then became a schoolteacher, versed in the classics, so he would have been familiar with those one-eyed blacksmiths of Greek mythology, the Cyclops: Arges, Steropes, and Brontes.
The last name meant "thunder", which would later fit nicely with the tempestuous theme of Emily's masterpiece.
But it's just as likely the name change was prompted by current affairs. In 1799, when Brunty/Prunty was still teaching at a hedge-school in Co Down, England's hero Lord Nelson was being honoured by the King of Naples for defying the French navy.
The title conferred on him on that occasion, Duke of Bronte, may have given a cue to the upwardly mobile headmaster, soon bound for Cambridge and a career as an Anglican minister.
An early biographer of Emily, Mary F. Robinson, saw the name change as part of an ambition to escape the poverty of his origins. One of 10 children who had inherited "strength, good looks, and a few scant acres of potato-growing soil" in Aghaderg, he was pointed towards university by an impressed local clergyman whose children he taught, and the young man duly obliged.
As Robinson writes: "He left Ireland in July 1802, never to visit it again. He never cared to look again on the scenes of his early struggle. He never found the means to revisit his mother or home, friends or country. Between Patrick Brontë, proud of his Greek profile and his Greek name, the handsome undergraduate at St John's, and the nine, shoeless, hungry young Pruntys of Aghaderg, there stretched a distance not to be measured by miles." Having Hellenised his own children, in name and education, Bronte Snr lived to see three of them achieve literary fame - contributing to it himself by commissioning Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, which would paint him in a harsh light.
Unfortunately, their fame was mostly posthumous. All his offspring predeceased him, Charlotte's 39 years easily the closest any of them got to old age.
It was while attending her brother Branwell's funeral in October 1848 that Emily caught the infection from which she would never recover. Her condition degenerated into tuberculosis. And, after refusing treatment, she died on December 19th.
Poor as her health was, Emily certainly did not lack mental fortitude. In her final poem, Last Lines, she embraced her fate with a religious fervour: "No coward soul is mine,/ No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:/ I see Heaven's glories shine/ And faith shines equal, arming me from fear."