An Irishman's Diary

IT WAS a favourite of my mother, who departed this world recently. So it double grieves me to find the term "figairey" featuring on the endangered species list of Diarmaid Ó Muirithe's new book, Words We Don't Use (Much Anymore).

As the author explains, the examples included are all “either on the brink of extinction of have already been deemed obsolete by the great dictionaries”. And like him, I would not have thought figairey – sometimes spelt “figary” or “fegary” and meaning “whim”, “foolish action”, or “tantrum” – was in the at-risk category.

Alas, Diarmaid points with a heavy heart to such recent cases as a 16-year-old Wicklow schoolgirl who was told by her teacher to avoid using the word, since “it wasn’t correct English”. Such distrust of dialects is all too common in schools, he writes.

Thus a term that, correct or not, is found in Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall and many parts of England, including Shakespeare’s Warwickshire, may not be long for this world. Says the author: “I was astounded to hear that [figairey] has been placed on the list of words thought to be in danger of not surviving past 2050 by some university dialect surveys”.

Ó Muirithe admits an emotional attachment to the words featured in his book. And I know what he means. I also share his mild annoyance that figarey’s likely ancestor – vagary – continues to thrive, in and out of schools; although why a word whose first syllable is pronounced “vague” should be considered more respectable by English teachers is a mystery.

Not all the words on the danger list are dialectal, mind you.

Another surprise inclusion is that fine old verb accost, which had undergone many evolutions in its time, from the bawdy Shakespearian version (when it was something you did to a maiden, perhaps while plying her with drink) to the innocuous one in which it meant only to greet somebody.

Now, suggests Ó Muirithe, the sole surviving sense is one that features in court cases, describing approaches by members of the world’s oldest profession to potential customers.

Interestingly, a recent example in this newspaper – from the columnist Lucy Kellaway – was in the more-or-less that sense. To wit she admitted accosting a shelf-stacker in Tesco: albeit only in the cause of elucidating some management guff from Tesco’s new CEO, who had spoken of his ambition to “embrace” and “love” his staff “so that they in turn will love the customers”.

In her accost-benefit analysis, no such love had been forthcoming. And such examples apart, the verb is now – in that dread phrase – known to gardaí (mainly). Ó Muirithe laments that since the word has become “confined to a specific misdemeanour in law, it may be considered to be on a life-support machine”.

INDEED, as entertaining as his book is, it has an element of the hospital about it, featuring as it does row upon row of words in different stages of unwellness. Some, like discombobulate, have every chance of making a recovery. Others, like kenspeckle, are probably beyond the reach of medicine.

In the latter category, I fear, was an old friend I came across in the F-ward, a few beds up from figairey. Not a personal old friend, I must add. In fact, I’d never heard the word used in this sense.

But according to Ó Muirithe, in parts of Ireland, England, and Scotland, “friend” once meant “relative”, more or less, with no automatic connotations of amicability. Hence he quotes a Cavan correspondent saying of someone: “We’re near friends but we don’t speak”.

In the same ward too, nearby, was “fond”, not meaning “affectionate” as it does now, but in the old sense of “foolish, silly, daft”. In Wexford, you would formerly (and perhaps may still) hear the phrase “as fond as a brush”. So, in short, it appears that there was a time in Ireland when you might have been described as someone’s “fond friend”, and it could have been an insult twice over.

Speaking of friends, in the relative meaning, the word aunt also features in the book, although not in the sense of a female equivalent of uncle (if you still follow me). Ó Muirithe admits he was taken aback once when he heard an old Dublin man from Kimmage disparage a young politician as a “bloody useless aunt”.

Upon further inquiry, the speaker explained that the word here meant “whore”. And yet in all his dialect dictionaries, the author found only one such incidence of the term, from Lincolnshire. How it reached Kimmage, en route to apparent obsolescence, remains a mystery.

Not all obsolescences are to be regretted, clearly. Which fact was underlined to me by yet another patient I saw in the f-ward. On the way out, I noticed his vaguely familiar face in the bed next the door. “Is it yourself?” I asked him. And sure enough, it was he – Frank, I mean – although not in any of the versions we might recognise.

No. According to Ó Muirithe, frank also once meant “pig sty”. In which sense, he acknowledges, the word is “long obsolete”. And proper order too, I say; although I’m slightly miffed that the author saw fit to include it, for the benefit or posterity, in his otherwise delightful collection.