An Irishman's Diary

RE-READING Flann O'Brien's The Hard Liferecently, I noticed a word that might have been considered a misprint had the author not used it twice in quick succession. It was clearly intended as an adjective describing the weather; and bad weather at that. But although such terms are normally assured of regular employment in this country, I couldn't recall ever hearing it before.

This, in an exchange between the book’s main protagonist and a friend, is the relevant passage:

– Take a chair, Rafferty, take a chair. It’s a bit hash this evening.

– Yes indeed, Mr Collopy.

– Very hash.

The mainstream English dictionaries were predictably silent when consulted on the matter. And as usual, the silence seemed even more deafening in that mother-and-father of lexicons, the OED, whose vast recesses not only fail to mention the possibility of "hash weather" but refuse to recognise "hash" as an adjective of any kind: limiting its usages to two noun forms and a verb.

So I turned instead, as I often do, to Terry Dolan’s treasury of Hiberno-English. And there, sure enough, was a meteorological “hash” recorded as a noun meaning “very heavy rainfall”.

The related adjective, however, was given as “hashy”; and, interestingly, the rainfall seemed to abate somewhat between the noun and adjectival form. “Hashy” was said to mean only “wet, sleety, slushy”. But, as I concluded, perhaps this was itself a comment on the notoriously changeable Irish climate, which cannot be relied upon even for the duration of a dictionary definition.

In any case, still curious about Flann O’Brien’s version and what had happened to it, I typed the phrase “a bit hash” – cordoned off by quotation marks, to avoid legal problems – into the search engine of this newspaper’s archive. Which exercise produced precisely four results: the oldest of them dating from 1960.

Unfortunately, despite my precautions, the three more recent mentions were all in stories about cannabis use. The Irish Timesarchive search is a bit like a Garda alsatian, it seems. You tell it you want only the phrase "a bit hash" , but as soon as it smells the H-word, it starts barking excitedly and sniffing around people's undergarments.

Next thing you know you’re having to apologise to some respectable citizen who has never touched an obscure meteorological adjective in his life and is guilty of nothing more than having “a bit of hash” hidden in his Y-fronts.

Anyway, having eliminated three of the four archive “hits” (perhaps an unfortunate choice of word) from my inquiries, I was left with only one case of adjectival hash: the one from 1960. And who should be its source? Why, the very same Flann O’Brien, of course: writing under his other main pseudonym.

Thus, in an article affecting to be “The True Biography of Myles na Gopaleen”, he describes his semi-mythical hero taking a tram journey to Clontarf one day in the company of Michael Davitt. Here’s the relevant extract: “That is a very hash day,” the conductor said when collecting the fares.

“It is indeed hash,” Myles said.

“Tell me,” Davitt said, “just WHAT is the meaning of this word ‘hash’?” “I have no idea,” Myles replied. “But all Dublin people use it. It is applied to the weather, but it appears to have no relevance to the nature of the weather.” This last comment would seem to rule out one possibility: that Flann/Myles was poking fun at a certain class of Dublin accent, so that the word under discussion was in fact “harsh”, except that such persons could not bring themselves to pronounce anything as vulgar as the letter “R”.

On the contrary, if the word’s meaning really was as vague as Myles suggests, it would also explain the range of conditions – all on the general theme of wetness, admittedly – in Professor Dolan’s definition. But then again, it might be risky to place too much faith in any claim made by Myles, even in his “true biography”.

It is potentially significant that The Hard Lifeand the aforementioned column were written around the same time: 1960/61. Perhaps this could be the germ of a thesis for some upcoming literary theorist or meteorologist, exploring the possibility that hash weather was a short-lived micro-climate affecting Dublin during that period and never heard of before or since.

Or maybe there is at least some truth in Myles’s suggestion, and “hash” was indeed a multi-purpose adjective, perhaps invented by a weather-weary populace.

It was the end of the grim 1950s, after all, and the nation’s energy levels were at a post-independence low. Maybe the adjective was designed just to save them having to come up with a new description every time conditions changed. In which case, the mystery is that the word ever died out.