Black and white issue – Frank McNally on badgers, balcony scenes, and onomastic recycling

Writing about the name Tadhg last week, I suggested it derived from an Irish word meaning "poet" or "storyteller". That's the usual theory, and an understandably popular one in the Tadhg community. But David Stifter, Professor of Old Irish at Maynooth University, has strong doubts about it and favours a competing argument, that the name derives instead from a word meaning "badger".

No, not "broc" – that's a different story. This one would make Tadhg a relation of the German "dachs", Basque "azkoin", and Latin "taxo". David cites persuasive scholarship on the subject by Alan Mac an Bhaird, "Tadhg MacCein and the badgers", from 1980.

So why, if it had such humble origins, did the name become so popular in Gaelic Ireland? Well, firstly, explains the professor, it’s not that humble. “Badgers are not small, negligible animals,” he points out; “they are actually rather dangerous, ferocious beasts [and] qualify as much for heroic names as do the wolf, fox, hawk, or other such predators.”

In any case, once a name is established, it quickly takes on a life of its own, independent of meaning. “Frank” is a good example, he adds, for my benefit.

A name to be reckoned with – Frank McNally on the importance of being Tadhg

---

Lie of the landscape? Frank McNally on trying to put himself in the picture

---

Park Life - on war and peace in Dublin’s greatest green space

---

Put a head on that: Croke Park headers and ageing stout

---

Some 1,800 years ago, that might have been given to a Germanic boy as an expression of the parents’ hope  that he be “free” and “honest”. It has long since been “semantically decoupled”, however. Now, most Franks are named after other Franks. Same with Tadhgs. The Germans have a word for this, naturally: “nachbenennung”. In English, it might be defined as “onomastic recycling”.

***

This is important to remember given another traditional characteristic of the badger. As well as being ferocious, it is also known for being smelly. Any implications about the personal hygiene of latter-day Taghgs can be dismissed on the nachbenennung principle.

And that brings me to another email on the subject, this time from Peadar MacMághnais, concerning the late John Montague.

Montague, as Peadar reminds me, was both a poet and a Tadhg. Or at least he was a “Mac Thaidhg”, ancestrally. “MacTague” would have been a more standard anglicisation, Peadar writes, but that had “plebeian connotations”. So some such families, including the poet’s, “adopted the more stylish Montague”.

The Brooklyn-born, Tyrone-descended Montague called this “protective colouring” and its importance was illustrated to him once by an aunt in Garvaghy. When he passed on somebody’s breezy greetings to “Betty Tague”, she warned him never to call her that again. Montague reversed the historic process by signing himself as “Sean Mac Thaidhg”. He also reclaimed his identity in a poem about Northern Ireland’s warring tribes: “Falls or Shankill/Lecky or Fountain/love’s alleyway/message scrawled/Popehead: Tague/my own name/hatred’s synonym.”

But if “Montague” was adopted as a disguise, it didn’t always work. In my (South Ulster) experience, the name is sometimes pronounced with two syllables, and as “Mon-taig”, rather than the three of the poet, or indeed of Shakespeare’s Romeo, another victim of warring clans.

Speaking of which, I presume Juliet was not thinking about Tadhgs or badgers during the balcony scene. And yet there she is, reflecting on the meaningless of names (“What’s Montague? It is not hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, not any other part belonging to a man”), while also raising olfactory issues: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

***

Wednesday is the first of two anniversaries in sadly quick succession involving Arthur Griffith. One of the architects of Irish independence, he was born 150 years ago on March 31st, 1871. But the centenary of his death will follow all too soon, in August twelve months. In between these dates, Ireland will mark other major milestones in which he was implicated, not least the centenary of James Joyce's Ulysses, published in February 1922.

For long after his death, Griffith was the forgotten man of Ireland's revolution, partly because he had always preferred peaceful agitation. But Joyce certainly did not forget him. As Des Gunning writes in a publication to mark the sesquicentenary, Griffith has the unique distinction of being mentioned, directly or by inference – in all 18 episodes of Ulysses and gets a paragraph in Finnegans Wake for good measure.

This is the subject of one of several essays in a special edition of Cut & Paste, an annual journal marking Griffith’s birthday. The title is another example of nachbenennung. It echoes Griffith’s own newspaper Scissors and Paste, produced in 1914 and 1915 to reprint stories from elsewhere that would otherwise be culled by the British war censor. Hard copies of the latest issue of C & P are available from Printwell Books, 17-21 Church Street East, Dublin 3 or info@printwell.ie.