HIBERNIAN IMAGERY.
BEYOND and above the vocabulary which a person uses in common with his fellows, he will have a certain number, varying in individual cases, of words and phrases and turns of speech which reflect his personality. Sometimes these amount, in families and intimate circles, to a regular lingo, often bewildering to the outsider. Thus, a friend told the present writer how, when lunching out one day, he was electrified on hearing his hostess —a particularly ladylike and refined woman—remark to the footman, "John, take down that leg of mutton and sit upon it until the master comes in,"—to sit upon being the not very elegant cant phrase obtaining in that family for to keep a thing hot, This anecdote has always seemed to as to illustrate very pointedly the danger of using a lingo in mixed society. With some people it takes the form of intentionally mispronouncing words, or employing malaprops which, when need in the presence of persons not belonging to the family or circle in question, and consequently not possessed of that particular "comprehension" on which Tolstoi comments so acutely in his " Souvenirs," are set down to ignorance. Thus, we know a lady whu never misses a chance of saying of a conspicuous object or person that it or he is "the sinecure of every eye," and we confess to having been guilty, on the first occasion we heard her use it, of the convic- tion—since corrected—that she spoke in innocence, and not with malice prepense. Similarly, in the writer's own family, several Irish malaprops—of which one, "as white as the drivelling snow," may serve as an example—have established themselves so firmly in common use, that it requires a conscious effort to overcome the habit and say the right word. The worst and most intolerable form of lingo is that almost universally prevalent among young men about town, who eke out their own inanity by the " gag " of the music-halls—scraps and shreds of popular songs—a dialect the essence of which is that it must be compre- hended of the vulgar. The nuisance of this system is that the most simple and everydayexpreseions are seized upon and debased by constant association with a vulgar context. What we have in our mind, however, is something very different from the borrowed buffoonery of the gilded youth. It is that peculiar colouring to be found in Irish speech,— that mixture of picturesqueness, exaggeration, and con- fusion which leads such a charm to the conversation of Irishmen and Irishwomen, gentle and simple. Whatever may be said in disparagement of the Irish gentry, it must at least be conceded that they have the keenest appreciation for the humour of the Irish peasantry, a fact which is amply proved by their habit of adopting and employing such peasant colloquialisms. As to the origin of the word " fantigne," signifying a fuss, or state of impatience or excitement, we are not prepared to speak authoritatively, bat it has always seemed to us admirably expressive. Irishmen have a delightful way of using the word " dint " which cannot be too highly commended. Thus, a Kerry friend remarked to the writer, on a very black night, as they were stumbling along a wooded path,—" Sure, we'll be desthroyed with the dint of the darkness." Extra- vagant behaviour is generally described as being " beyond the beyonds," while the most effective way of laying stress on the rarity of a thing is to say that it happens " once in a blue moon." What a characteristic phrase, again, is the Irish variant for cockcrow, "the screech of (lawn " ! To jump is expanded into " to throw a leap," and to behave properly into " to have conduct." The foregoing are all expressions in frequent use, and into the origin of them it is not our purpose to inquire. But in the coining of new phrases just the same picturesqueness is observable. Thus, it was an Irish lady who once amused her auditors greatly by remarking in a rueful tone, in the course of a conversation on the size of feet,—"My feet are fearfully big, —regular cubic feet." At the risk of spoiling a good anecdote, we are fain to record the following fragments of a description of the wonderful adventures of a horse-dealer at Punchestown. He was craning over on to the course at the side of the big jump, when the barrier gave way, and before he could recover himself, the whole field were on top of him. " I declare to ye most solemnly," continued the narrator, " that seventeen horses changed their feet in the small of his back." The sequel went as to tell how the very next day he was seen selling horses at a ---fair in another part of the county; "but then, he was a man of an iron constitution !" A certain exaggeration is no doubt often observable in these Irish anecdotes, and has led us to speculate whether the element of exaggeration so characteristic of Transatlantic humour may not be traceable to this source. A wild, " monntainy " gossoon will, half in jest no doubt, allude to a neighbouring village as the " methro- polls." Some friends of the writer recently moved a family from -a dilapidated hovel to a new cottage. The mother was half- crazy, and her sister who lived with them deaf and nearly blind. But she had not lost her wits, as her description of their troubles will prove. She said they were desthroyed from that meld castle —their former domicile—bailing it out all night. 'Twos that fabric made her hard of hearing, and upset her sister's mind. And, again, pointing to her sister,—" Look at her now, and she was the gracefullest girl in the place, and as honest as the Pope, until that fabric upset her mind." What makes the foregoing expressions so characteristically Irish is the incon- gruity of the words " fabric " and " castle." So, again, when a Mnneterman spoke of a horse being "as handy with his bind legs as any pugilist," it was in the choice of the word " pugilist," quite ae much as in the "bull," that the mental habit of the race revealed itself. But inasmuch as in the Irish "bull," the three traits that we have insisted on abuve—picturesqueness, confusion, and inaccuracy—are best exemplified, we may conclude this short paper with a few specimens of that admirable figure of speech. Finance is not a .subject specially calculated to promote the growth of flowers of rhetoric, and yet it was in connection with finance that two of the best " bulls " we know of were perpetrated. In the first instance, the speaker alluded to a sum as "a nest-egg for us to take our stand upon ;" in the other case, a projected economy was described as "a mere flea-bite in the ocean of Indian debt." For the following we are indebted to an Irish medical man, who assures us that it was the creation of a colleague. Some change was contemplated in reference to which he expressed himself in terms of the most vehement disapproval, declaring that it would have the effect of throwing " an apple of discord in their midst which, if not nipped in the bud, would burst out into a flame that would inundate the whole country." Nothing, however, for condensed confusion of thought can
surpass the celebrated remark of the man who asserted that the state of affairs was " enough to make a man commit suicide, or perish in the attempt."
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