All That Glit – Frank McNally on the ancient origins of a slippery word

On the site formerly known as Twitter the other day, a fellow Monaghan person asked if I was familiar with the concept of “glit”.

I wasn’t really, although I may have fallen in it one or twice growing up, because in the sense he heard the word – from his father – it describes a slippery soil or slime of the kind you might find in or around farmyards.

Luckily, my questioner also copied in David Stifter, professor of old Irish at Maynooth and a crack etymologist, who soon traced its usage to ancient Rome, where it was also an agricultural term, albeit rare.

“The funny (well for me) thing about the Latin word, which ultimately ends up in Monaghan as ‘glit’,” reported David, “is that it is only attested a single time in a text by Cato the Elder, in the 2nd century BC.”

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Among other talents, Cato the Elder was an expert on matters agrarian and used the adjective “glittus” when describing “sticky soil”. From glittus the word has descended to us via such French forms as “glette” and Middle English “gleet”.

Prof Stifter is not alone in finding Cato’s contribution to the understanding of Monaghan pedology funny. I do too. But it made me wonder if our best-known soil expert, Patrick Kavanagh, had ever used “glit” in a poem.

It seems not, although up the road in Derry, Seamus Heaney did, and of course Heaney always credited Kavanagh for giving him license to use such homely language in literature.

The word occurs in Heaney’s poem Fosterling, where he describes the watery ground of his birthplace: “I can’t remember never having known/The immanent hydraulics of a land/Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone/My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.”

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We’ll come back to “dailigone” shortly. But first, mention of Cato reminds me that where I grew up, as well as describing persons of senior or respected status in a community, the word “elder” was also the thing in which a cow kept her milk.

“Udder” is the more usual English term for this. And I suspect that “elder” is confined mainly to Ireland’s northern half. In any case, I was reminded of it when covering the Virginia Agricultural Show in Cavan back in August.

That show spans an extraordinary range of events – there was probably even an immanent hydraulics section, in the machinery part.

But the glamour event was a meeting of the elders: the All-Ireland dairy cow championship. And although the master of ceremonies had a rich vocabulary for describing the attributes required of competitors, including “beautiful mammary systems”, “elder” was his standard term.

The English Dialect Dictionary (1898) suggests the word is also sometimes used for a woman’s breast, at least in Scotland – or to be more exact, by “the lower classes” of Aberdeen. But it comes from Dutch, apparently, and has been in English since at least 1679.

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On foot of my column about Fermanagh’s Cooneen or Coonian poltergeist, the only Irish ghost that ever emigrated, a reader points out that there is also, or used to be, a brand of cheese with that name.

“Cooneen Goat’s Cheese” to be exact (not to be confused with ghost cheese, although maybe it should be, at least for a special Halloween edition).

The reader also reminds me that, when mentioning the product in an Irishman’s Diary some years ago, Wesley Boyd suggested the goats involved must be protestant, because Catholics always call the area “Coonian”.

But the Protestantism of goats goes without saying, surely. I have never known a male one, in Ulster or otherwise, to be called anything other than “Billy”.

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Getting back to Heaney’s “dailigone”, not only is it a lovely word at any time of year, it is especially poignant in the season now upon us.

A contraction of “daylight” and “gone”, it means dusk. And its use is not confined to the poetic natives of Derry. It also turns up in a 1953 book, The English Dialect of Donegal.

For those of us who hate the autumn clock change, the hour of dailigone is arriving all too soon this week. Walking past Christ Church Cathedral at 5pm on Monday, in suitably sombre mood, I found myself echoing John Donne: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls ...”

Then pedantry got the better of me and I couldn’t help noticing that the cathedral was still tolling six times instead of five. Either Christ Church was struggling to accept the end of daylight-saving time, as I am, or somebody had forgotten to put the bells back.