John Butleron the generational baton that is Hiberno-English
'If you're at a party with a slewtherer, an amadán and a lúdramán, you must question the qualities of the host'
Recently, I was on the way to Co Clare with my parents and we drove past the house of a famous Irishman, an imposing granite mansion set back from the road and ringed with tall, dense privet. We began to talk about the man of the house, whom I knew well by reputation, and my father used the word "slewtherer" to describe him.
I am well used to such gobbledegook, and thought nothing of it. Shortly afterwards, I studied the map of towns we were heading towards, their anglicised names hinting at other meanings buried under layers of history. We drove into Liscannor, the fort of O'Connor, and later we left Kilkee, the church of St Chaoi.
Slewtherer. I found myself playing with the word, running it through a mental thesaurus and trying to recall if I had ever heard of it before. I didn't think I had. Sometimes, when you hear a voice that you recognise faintly on the radio - but can't put a name to - there is a spell of a few minutes when you can ask yourself what you really think of this person, before their face is drawn into view and you are compromised by what you associate with them. This is the honeymoon period.
The same goes for words. For a moment, you can savour a new word on its own terms before it is yoked permanently to a meaning. The word slewtherer is surely onomatopoeic; a slewtherer must be slewthery, slithery, slippery, somebody sneaky and surely not to be trusted. Still, though, the word was similar enough to another word, one I had heard older family members use to define someone who is somewhat foolish. That word is lúdramán.
Was this man also a lúdramán? It was quite possible. We began a discussion about the differences between slewtherers and lúdramáns, and shortly found ourselves in agreement that there were many identifiable differences between the slewtherer and the lúdramán. The slewtherer is far too sly to be a lúdramán, and the lúdramán would not have the wherewithal to be slewthery or slewthersome. Lúdramáns are loodars or ludars, extreme versions of amadáns, and amadáns, as we all know, are complete idiots.
There's nothing like using something new to excavate something old, and a Google search for slewthering offers a website containing a dictionary of Hiberno-English words, curated by Prof Terry Dolan of UCD. How dearly I wish www.hiberno-english.com has been available to me when I was lectured by the same professor in the same college many years back. And lo, under a search for my new favourite word comes this entry attributed to "Carleton, Shane Fadh's wedding, ed. Cronin, 190": "When we arrived, there was nothing but shaking hands and kissing, and all kinds of slewsthering - men kissing men - women kissing women - and after that men and women all through other (qv)."
Leaving aside any mischievous implication of same-sex high jinks at some groundbreaking wedding of yore, and the rogue "s" in the middle of the word, it sounds like slewthering might bear more similarity to plamásing than it does to being a looder or an amadán. Knowing this, if you were to draw a Venn diagram representing their relationship, the slewtherer's circle would never intersect the lúdramán's circle, though the two types of people could be said to have some kind of tangential relationship, both being persons you don't want to find yourself sitting beside at a dinner party. If you are at a dinner party with a slewtherer, an amadán and a lúdramán, you must start to question the qualities of the host, but remember, if you find them to be slewtherers, they cannot also be lúdramáns. Which is it going to be? If you don't know, you might be a lúdramán or worse still, an amadán.
On our way back from Clare, we stopped for a pot of tea in Moate, Co Westmeath. Sitting in the little cafe on a Monday afternoon drinking tea and scones and watching a wasp hurl itself against the windowpane, the scene felt traditional to me. But as I ate, I remembered recently hearing a radio interview with a Garda sergeant about the growing problem of drug abuse in rural areas of Ireland, in which he tried to illustrate how bad it had all got by exclaiming - with, no doubt, eyes wide open - "there's ecstasy in Moate!".
Though there was a fierce amount of traffic outside the window, to me, Moate seemed to be the same as it ever was. People can get too worried about change. Some of my father's generation (but not my father, I hasten to add) like to complain that the original essence of who we are is being lost forever, that younger generations have taken their linguistic cues from foreign television and not nearly enough from their ancestors.
But we don't need to worry about our heritage being lost. When our children's children want to score some ecstasy in Moate, they will go looking for "yokes". When they try to steal cars to joy-ride, they will always have someone "keep sketch", and when they go out for a night on the tiles, they will get "scooped" like total "skangers" and end up with heads down "the jacks", not the toilet.
Hiberno-English is alive and well, and not just living in the pages of some desiccated library book. Along with all the clear evidence of everything changing, there is greater proof that everything is the same as it ever was.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com