Notes from beyond the Pale

It's from Ireland that we imported the phrase "beyond the pale" - the "Pale" was an English enclave on the east coast - but not, despite what the lady of this house imagined, the line about "by hook or by Crook."

Hook is a handsome and still manned lighthouse in Wexford; Crook is not just a former colliery town in Co Durham but a hamlet across the bay.

Cromwell, she supposed, planned to invade Ireland "by Hook or by Crook" - and for once she supposed wrongly.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable confirms that the expression probably derives from the old manorial custom of allowing the peasants to take as much firewood from overhead branches as they could reach with a shepherd's crook or cut down with a billhook.

There's even a "hooke or crooke" reference in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, published in 1590 - and in 1590, neither Oliver nor his army were so much as a twinkle in the national imagination.

THE celebrated Abbey Theatre in Dublin is marking its centenary, its early stage never more greatly set alight than when, in a performance of Playboy of the Western World, someone used the word "shift" - meaning petticoat.

The Irish Catholics were a conservative lot. There was hell on.

These days, of course, "shift" can mean anything from eight hours down the pit - a hard shift, if ever - to the capitals key on a computer. The Oxford English notes 20 main meanings of the noun, 23 of the verb.

In southern Ireland, meanwhile, lived a lady known as Petticoat Loose. That worried the natives, too: they condemned her as a witch, and shiftlessly burned her at the stake.

BLASPHEMY be blowed, "Gordon Bennett" has become a euphemism for "God almighty", or some similarly sacrilegious exclamation. There really was a Gordon Bennett, though, and we stumbled across him in the heritage centre in Athy, Co Kildare.

James Gordon Bennett Jnr, who may also have been the playboy of the western world, was the son of the Scotsman who founded the New York Herald and who - colourfully, idiosyncratically, oft outrageously - inherited his father's publishing empire.

Mostly he ran it from Paris, or from his 301ft yacht in the Mediterranean, but it was the stunt loving Bennett who sent Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to find Dr Livingstone, an expedition which took two years but which sent the sales graph into the perpendicular.

Bennett was also an avid sportsman, introduced polo to America, promoted yachting and hot air ballooning and is regarded as the forerunner, if not the founder, of Formula 1 motor racing.

Since the sport was banned in England, Bennett took the 1903 race to Athy. The total distance was 327.5 miles, the number of entrants 12, the average speed 49.2 mph despite a 12mph speed limit in towns and cyclists in front of the cars to ensure that they stuck to it.

Selwyn Edge, the Englishman who'd won the 1902 race, was disqualified after buckets of water were thrown onto his tyres to cool them, and to help keep them on the wheel rim.

It was for more egregious and more erratic escapades, however, that the great sportsman inadvertently entered the English language as well.

He also made the Guinness Book of World Records, listed under "Greatest engagement faux pas" after the New Year's Eve occasion when, brain enamelled by the hard stuff, he turned up at his fiancee's parents' New York home, mistook the fireplace for the lavatory and promptly extinguished the flames.

The forthcoming marriage was forthcoming no longer, As they've been saying ever since, Gordon Bennett!

SUB-TITLED "6,000 curious and every day phrases explained", the newly published "A Word in Your Shell-like" awaited and enriched the return.

It's compiled by Nigel Rees, he of the celebrated "Quote...unquote" radio programme, runs from "Abandon hope all ye who enter who" to "Yum, yum pig's bum" and also embraces Gordon Bennett - "a man with an amazing reputation".

It's the sort of book which is ham and eggs to a column like this, and which should be consulted much more widely. When the Irish are no longer eyed so appreciatively, we shall return to it next week.

LAST time out, we offered a little spelling test - pick any one from three alternatives, we said. (And minuscule, incidentally, WAS correct.)

We are upbraided, nonetheless, by retired linotype operator Kenneth Stoves. "You refer to three alternatives. This is not possible because the alternative is between two only. I learned this in the good old days of hot metal newspaper production."

He's quite right, of course, and clearly those inky tradesmen were taught well.

Peter Sotheran - "on behalf of all traditionally trained printers, type setters and proof readers" - recalls the tickets which his company printed for the Mississippi Bar at Redcar racecourse.

"We took care to spell it correctly but noticed mid-season that the name board over the bar was an 's' short. Not wishing to embarrass the racecourse management, we adjusted the spelling of the admission tickets to match theirs."

They repainted the name board the same week, correcting the spelling. As doubtless they say at Redcar races, some days you just can't win.

FOR reasons forgotten, recent columns have also pondered the origin of the phrase "The dog's bollocks" - meaning, we said, the very best.

Mischievously, Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland disagrees. "I always thought it came from the fact that it's something the owner is so proud of, it's always on display."

We'd also mentioned the Northumberland based band Los Cojones del Perro - Spanish for the same sort of thing - prompting Willis Collinson in Durham to recall his old friend Cledwyn Owen Jones, from Montgomeryshire.

The name was abbreviated to CO Jones on his suitcases. "It would have raised many a laugh," muses Willis, "if ever he travelled to Spain."

THE column two weeks ago also mentioned Shostakovich's Gadfly symphony, prompting Eric Smallwood in Middlesbrough to another flight of fancy.

The lettering on Middlesbrough's 30ft Bottle of Notes - familiar to all who enter the courts complex - quotes Coosje van Bruggen's "Memos of a Gadfly", further proof that the pesky things are everywhere.

"I like to remember seagulls in full flight, gliding over the ring of canals...."

Perhaps Eric Cantona has been to the Boro, an' all.

....and finally, let us return to St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, where against a column in the west end leans an ancient door with a great hole hacked through it. Once the door led to the chapter house.

In 1492, the year that Columbus came across America, a ferocious argument broke out in the cathedral between the Earls of Kildare and of Ormonde, both backed by heavily armed retainers.

Ormonde retreated to the chapter house, from where a peaceful settlement appeared to have been reached. Kildare was invited to shake on it through the hole in the door, though the other lot might have been waiting with their broadswords.

Hence, evermore, the phrase about "chancing one's arm" - and, back in dear old Blighty, Gadfly chances it again next week.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ news/gadfly.html

Published: ??/??/2004