Paws for thought – An Irishman’s Diary about GAA euphemisms and medieval cats

It’s a funny thing, but whenever you hear the word “savoury” on TV or radio, you can be fairly certain that the subject under discussion is food. Whereas when you hear its opposite – “unsavoury” – you can be equally confident it’s part of the commentary on a GAA match.

Yes, “unsavoury” is sometimes used of rugby and soccer too. But as an adjective to describe undercurrents of menace, short of outright violence, it’s especially popular in the GAA. Combined with the words “element” or “incident”, or “scenes”, it has replaced Micheál O’Hehir’s beloved “schemozzle” as the association’s favourite euphemism.

Its first broadcast outing in May or June now announces summer as surely as the call of the cuckoo does spring. This must be why I find it inappropriately reassuring. Watching the Donegal-Tyrone match on Sunday, for example, and hearing Martin Carney fret about the “most unsavoury” nature of some exchanges, I could almost smell the burgers and the new-mown grass.

Despite the wintry conditions in Ballybofey, I knew warmer weather was on the way. If Carney had remarked instead that there were “choc-ices” on sale in the ground, it couldn’t have been more cheering.

Strange to say, though, you never hear the word “unsavoury” used in relation to food. I suppose that’s because “sweet” is savoury’s usual opposite in that context (although the term “afters” can refer to either dessert or to the sort of incidents that worry GAA commentators).

But here, as usual, there is no logic to language. The recent “gay cake” controversy in Northern Ireland, involving as it did both confectionery and a lawsuit, was almost by definition an unsavoury incident. And yet not even the DUP called it that.

Anyway, changing the subject, while still speaking of marriage (as the cake was supposed to), a reader has drawn my attention to an amusing faux pas he noticed recently on the online lexicon dictionary.com.

He was looking up the word “bann”, as in “marriage banns”, the posting of which is the traditional nuptial planning application, whereby a couple advertise their intention to wed, allowing objectors a chance to “forbid the banns”, if necessary.

As dictionary.com makes clear, the two-n "bann" has the same root as the one-n "ban". Both derive from an older word meaning to "proclaim", or "curse", which has also fathered such terms as "banishment", "bandit", and "contraband". But the site always likes to quote examples of a term's use in literature. So for "ban", it offers three poetic extracts. One, correctly, is from William Blake's London ("In every cry of every Man/In every infant's cry of fear,/In every voice: in every ban,/The mind-for'gd manacles I hear").

The other two are from a much-loved Irish medieval poem, “Pangur Ban”, as the site calls it. And alas, for want of a fada, this is where the dictionary goes astray.

As readers will know, the poem should be “Pangur Bán”. As which, far from being about proclamations of marriage, or curses, it concerns the purely platonic relationship between a script-writing monk, working late at night in the 9th century, and his cat Pangur, who happens to be white.

“I and Pangur Bán my cat,” he begins (in Robin Flower’s translation), “Tis a like task we are at:/Hunting mice is his delight,/Hunting words I sit all night.”

And so it continues, with the monk distracted from his labours by the mouse-hunt and yet at the same being taught an important lesson by his pet. The poem concludes: “Practice every day has made/Pangur perfect in his trade;/I get wisdom day and night/Turning darkness into light.”

The poem’s charm is increased – except for librarians – by our knowledge that the monk wrote it as a doodle, down the side of a priceless copy of St Paul’s Epistle, still preserved in its vandalised state at a monastery in Austria. It’s because of the likes of him that the National Library and other such establishments will not allow pens in the reading room.

That Pangur Bán is lost in translation on dictionary.com may highlight the wisdom of our ancestors in inventing Hiberno-English to save British and American visitors from having to wrestle with Gaelic. This would have made the cat Pangur Bawn, like Colleen Bawn, and saved the monk from any misunderstandings involving marriage.

I know, by the way, that the concept of religious celibacy took a while to catch on in early-Christian Ireland. But I think by the 9th century, the Colleen Ban (as it were) was well in place.