An Irishman's Diary

WE WERE talking here last week about the unfortunate Irish Christian name, Fechin, and the double misfortune that might arise were this to be combined with certain Anglicised surnames, viz: “Thank you for flying with us today. We’ll be hearing from the captain, Fechin Looney, shortly. But first I’ll take you through the emergency evacuation procedures . . .” The good thing about Fechin, however, is that being phonetically controversial in itself, parents who choose it for a son will at least be on guard against such troublesome combinations. Or so you would hope. Whereas other forenames, innocuous in their own right, might be innocently combined with surnames whose incompatibility is not noticed until it’s too late.

My thanks to several readers who, for example, have drawn attention to the old Irish forename, Sonabha. It’s a girl’s name: a small mercy in the circumstances. And it is rather lovely on its own. But to get a mild (and hypothetical) flavour of the potential complications, imagine if those well-known Irish estate agents, the Gunne family, had a child called Sonabha.

There are worse combinations than that, I’m told: not all fictional. And although I won’t go into further examples here, in case of adding to anyone’s pain, they do at least help explain the famous case of the former governor of Texas, James “Big Jim” Hogg who, distracted by joy at the birth of his first-born daughter, decided to call her “Ima”.

But back to Fechin; and my thanks also to Padraic de Bhaldraithe for explaining that, although anglicisation of Irish names can cause problems, they sometimes solve them too.

Padraic recalls a professor of psychology in UCD in the 1960s, a priest named Feichín Ó Dochartaigh, “whose elderly female relative used refer to him as the man with the unfortunate name”. But he adds, “in the English-speaking part of Connemara”, people get around the Fechin problem “by anglicising the name as Festus and more familiarly as Festy”.

In the Ballyconneely area, apparently, there is even a Frenchman so named. He was awarded the distinction by locals after he arrived in the 1970s to do a course in thatching and stayed.

Which begs the thought, incidentally, of what might have happened had it been another 7th-century Irish saint, rather than Fiacre, who went to France and gave his name to Parisian cabs. Rugby fans wandering that city next month might be complaining about how hard it is to get a “fechin taxi” after midnight, without anyone having to pardon their French.

Perhaps the best known Festy was Festy Mortimer, a boat-builder and fisherman who features in Tim Robinson's book: Connemara – The last Pool of Darkness. Aside from his local renown, Mortimer became an interesting footnote in the history of European philosophy, when for a period in the late 1940s, he was a neighbour to the temporary Connemara resident, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The latter is widely considered the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell called him “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius”. And that genius was still at work when in 1948, Wittgenstein spent time living in Rosroe, near Killary Harbour. He was probably exploring new ideas in the philosophy of mathematics there.

But of what exactly, we don’t know, because Festy Mortimer did some cleaning work in the house where Wittgenstein stayed. And in an interview (for another book) 45 years later, Mortimer recalled burning – at Wittgenstein’s request – “a very large pile of used manuscript papers, many of which [. . .] had mathematical writing on them”. Which, even if he was only obeying orders, is the sort of detail that might make scholars of philosophy want to Gaelicise his name again.

THE EMBARRASSMENT caused by certain Anglicisations is not unique to Ireland. Even once respectable English names have evolved, due to vagaries in spelling, in unfortunate ways. And perhaps the classic example is that of a Yorkshireman who died 100 years ago this week.

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet, versions of which had existed for centuries. But the confusion is understandable, because he was a plumber – a master one at that – and he was also major innovator in the field of sanitary hardware. Indeed, his company is credited with the world’s first showroom of bathroom fittings, window displays of which are said to have made Victorian ladies faint with shock.

But back to his name, which bears no etymological relationship to his chosen line of work. On the contrary, it derives from the good old Anglo-Saxon verb “cropp”, meaning “to cut”. Thus, England’s original “Croppers” would have been mowers or farm labourers.

As for “crap”, that came from old Dutch, meaning “chaff”. And it was already a rude verb in English by the 1840s, when the plumber was only a boy. So although he did probably give his name to the American slang for toilet, the related verb at least seems to have predated him.

We still speak of someone “coming a cropper”. The crop here is a riding whip and, according to Brewer’s Dictionary, the expression refers to a bad fall, in which a rider hits the ground, “neck and crop” first. Well, the English surname Cropper could probably be said to have “come a Crapper”. But a century after the aforementioned plumber’s death, his company still bears it proudly – on among other things crests, some of which display the legend: “Crapper, by royal appointment.”