The Last Straw Frank McNallyWhenever Irish people feel oppressed by financial demands, a complaint we frequently make is that we're being charged "through the nose".
This newspaper's archive records use of the phrase in connection with bank fees, childcare costs, residential property tax, ticket surcharges, "hello money" (for supermarkets, not the Taoiseach's daughter), and the cost of education. I heard it again during the week, in the Fingal refuse charges row.
But what you're probably wondering is: where did this quaint phrase originate and what does it mean? And I'm delighted you asked, because the answers may help explain why we as a people often react badly when the authorities ask us for money.
According to Brewers Dictionary, the expression "to pay through the nose" probably derives from ninth-century Ireland, and a nose tax levied by the Danes. This was not a tax on noses, as such, because that would have been socially inequitable, and Scandinavians would never try anything like that. No, it was more like an early version of the service charge, the service offered being continued access to a full set of nostrils. The name came from the fact that if you didn't pay on time, the Danes would slit your nose. Also, you wouldn't be entered for the special free draw.
An argument against the Brewers explanation is that the phrase didn't appear in English until centuries later. One obvious explanation for this is that victims of the tax (I wonder if they got seven days notice that their noses were being disconnected?) may have had difficulty making themselves understood. "Ndhey nhslith nmhy dhose," they'd complain, and people would just nod sympathetically and think they had a particularly bad cold.
Yeah, sure, in the film Chinatown, Jack Nicholson gets his nose slit by Roman Polanski and, asked if it hurts, is able to utter one of the best one-liners in the history of cinema: "Only when I breathe." But you can't believe Hollywood.
The Danish tax theory would help explain other curious ideas popular in this country: for example, the importance of "keeping your nose clean". This was probably once common advice from mothers to their offspring, who'd be warned always to have a clean nose in case in they got run down by a tax inspector and ended up in hospital.
Anyway, as we all know, the Danes were expelled from Ireland in 1014 by Brian Boru, who sadly didn't live to enjoy his triumph. As he prayed in his tent afterwards, he was assassinated by a Danish warrior (either that or he was badly overcharged by a Danish tax collector). But it's an interesting comment on us as a people that, a millennium after the nose charge was abolished, we're still complaining about it.
Among the effects of the smoking ban in New York, apparently, is that bars and hotels are finding ingenious new ways to satisfy their customers' nicotine cravings. A typical result is the "Smokeless Manhattan", a cocktail made from port, Scotch whisky, and orange bitters, which is said to taste like smoke, and as a bonus - at about $14 a go - also burns a hole in your pocket.
One Italian restaurant has gone even further, offering deranged customers such delicacies as "filet mignon in tobacco-wine sauce, garnished with dried tobacco leaves".
In fact, the use of tobacco as a food additive didn't start with the smoking ban. Three years ago, the New York Times was already writing about a vogue for it among the city's most innovative chefs, as they sought exciting new ways to justify charging a fortune. An impressionable food writer waxed lyrical about one nicotine-laced dessert, saying the tobacco "adds a haunting richness that recalls an oak-aged spirit, with notes of leather, wet earth and mulled wine spices".
Personally, I think that sort of food writing also has a haunting richness, albeit one that suggests over-use of spirits, with notes of old rope, wet dishcloth, and whatever you're having yourself. But the worrying thing is that this sort of culinary experimentation could be in store for us after our smoking ban. And just at a time when our pubs and restaurants were finally getting the hang of basic food.
Doctors agree that in whatever form it is taken, tobacco is a bad thing. So while its use as a food additive might circumvent the ban, it will not exempt the consumer from health effects. This also goes for the other smoking substitutes once common in Ireland, such as tobacco-chewing and the taking of snuff. Snuff use was a particularly unpleasant habit. And if we as a people are to adopt it again, it gives me no pleasure to predict that we'll pay through the nose for it.