Seismic Shift – Frank McNally on the modest evolution of an amorous verb

Although now elevated to the Oxford English Dictionary, as we mentioned yesterday, the verb "to shift" in its amorous Irish meaning is oddly absent from my copy of another famous lexicon, the Hiberno-English one compiled by Terry Dolan.

That has only one listing for “shift”, as a noun meaning “chemise”. And the sole example of usage quoted is from a Meath correspondent, as follows: “She used put my shift out on the hedge; it’d soon dry in the sunshine.”

It is possible, I suppose, that you could get the other kind of shift on a hedge in Meath. That must have happened occasionally, on the way home from dances. Maybe it still does. But the Dictionary of HE does not entertain such a possibility.

Of course, the chemise version of the word could itself have amorous associations, and controversial ones at that. The most notorious example is recorded in one of two telegrams sent by Lady Gregory in 1907, updating WB Yeats (who was in Scotland) about the progress of The Playboy of the Western World's opening night. "Play a great success," read her first dispatch. "Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift," read the second.

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In fact, it was the plural of the term that sparked the Abbey riots, when Christy Mahon imagined "a drift of chosen females standing in their shifts". And yet by clothing the drift of females thus, JM Synge had been attempting a concession towards modesty.

For some in the audience, the real outrage of the scene was that it mocked an episode from the life of a national hero Cúchulainn. After fighting, the mythical warrior was prone to an early form of post-traumatic stress disorder known as “battle rage”, which frightened even his own men.

They finally solved his problem by having 30 naked virgins approach him on the plain of Macha, causing the shy hero to blush and avert his eyes, in which action “his battle rage left him”.

By invoking “a drift of chosen females standing in their shifts”, therefore, Christy was engaging in mild self-censorship. Moreover, he invoked them with indifference, by way of pledging his fidelity: “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only.” Still, the riots went ahead anyway.

Speaking of censorship, the amorous intent of “to shift” is not an exclusively Irish concept. As the OED points out, the term has a long, bawdy history in English, going back at least as far as a 1664 play in which a character speaks of someone “I might make a shift with”.

Two and a half centuries later, James Joyce used it similarly in Ulysses when he has Stephen recall in mock-archaic language an encounter with a prostitute "and she of the stews to make shift with in amorous delights."

The difference between that and the s-word’s modern meaning is summed up in the new OED definition: “Originally: sexual intercourse; and act or instance of this. Now chiefly (Irish English): kissing; sexual activity which stops short of intercourse.”

In other words, the latter-day Irish "shift" has at least one thing in common with the work of the late best-selling novelist Barbara Cartland. They both stop at the bedroom door.

It is not changing the subject entirely to mention that among the other new Hiberno-English entries to the OED is ráiméis, meaning “nonsensical talk; overblown or empty rhetoric; claptrap.” For despite the word’s sound and appearance, the lexicographers believe it to be have imported from English, via “romance”, which went native here at some point, losing the “n” and acquiring fadas.

Even so, the Gaelicised version has a long and orthographically complicated history, featuring in print as long ago as 1828 and since then racking up at least 23 different spellings, including rawmaysh, rhamaush, and ramesh.

But historically, the use of ráiméis also often seems to have been central to what we now call shifting. Sometimes it even took the form of a love-song or poem.

Hence an example quoted by the OED, from the Nenagh Guardian in 1873: "She did not wish to go the road, for fear she'd meet rollicking Larry Dillon, who was after composing a ramaush in her praise."

In similar vein is a line from a 1919 novel by Geraldine Cummins: "I'm not like them young lads that are growing up with their fancy talk about breaking hearts and love and all that raumeish. Sure, love is nothing but insanity."

That last argument may well be correct. But for the sake of romantics, and lest the OED be accused of depicting modern Ireland in a cynical light, I should point out that the latest update of the world's greatest dictionary also includes the word grá.