The last couple of posts I have published on Cassidyslangscam have been critical of the work of Manchán Magan, who writes books about the Irish language. Unfortunately, while a great many people seem to regard Magan as a national treasure, I am less impressed with his work. I find his writing pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, pompous and full of shit. I find his quantum woo and crystal-shop mysticism and endless backpacker’s tales almost unbearable.
However, the worst thing about his writing is the relentless diving into dictionaries to find odd anomalies and explain them in terms of some highly romanticised and over-philosophised vision of the inner nature of the Irish people.
Suppose there were a similar ‘expert’ on English – we’ll call him Malcolm Muggins. And suppose Malcolm, reading through the OED, happens to notice something that interests him. For example, he notices that fast can mean both something that is immobile (steadfast, fastened) and something that is quick (he is a fast runner). The etymological background of this is simple. The meaning of secure or tied up was the original meaning. Then in the Middle English period, the word’s meaning expanded and developed to mean strong or steady. And this then came to be applied to a strong or steady runner, so it came to mean quick. If you look at word etymologies, you will see similar developments all the time, where a word transforms randomly into a completely different meaning. However, Malcolm Muggins (like his Irish cousin) is a mystic and a romantic, so he has to find significance everywhere. So, the fact that a word can mean both immobile and speedy has to be an example of the English love of paradox and contradiction, so a couple of pages about English humour and Monty Python and absurdism will help to pack out Malcolm’s book. And then, of course, what about the supreme contradiction of how the English are both innovators and profoundly conservative? Great, that’ll fill the book up with a few more paragraphs about Cool Britannia and the Royal Family! This book is practically writing itself!
Of course, the dual meaning of fast is just one of those chance things that happens in language. But not if you are a romantic like Manchán Magan/Malcolm Muggins. Everything has to have a deep meaning, even if the actual phenomenon that all the philosophising is pegged to doesn’t even exist.
In this post, I will give you one very clear example of why you should take nothing as fact when you read a book or an article or watch a programme by Manchán Magan. One of his most bizarre claims about our language is that diadhánach is the word for the lonesomeness of a cow bereft of her calf. When I heard this, my first reaction was, yeah, right! No language needs a word for the lonesomeness of a cow bereft of her calf. Not even a language where most people have cows and live around them. How do I know? Well, think about it. Languages have words for a stool or a throne or an armchair but they don’t have words for ‘the kind of chair your grandmother would hate’ or ‘chairs on the right-hand side of the room’. They do not have them, because they do not need them and there is no benefit to having them.
So, I was immediately suspicious. I went to the Irish dictionaries. It isn’t in Ó Dónaill’s dictionary at all. So then I went to Dinneen’s dictionary and I found it there. Apparently it is pronounced diagánach and it’s an obscure dialect word from the Comeragh Mountains in Waterford. I’ll discuss what it means below, but let me just say a couple of words about Dinneen. Dinneen’s dictionary is an amazing book but it is strange, and eccentric and impractical and needs to be taken with a very generous pinch of salt. Generations of Irish learners have read through it looking for bizarre or obscene definitions. The great Flann O’Brien parodied its style:
Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. —act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger’s suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprechaun’s denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake’s clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman’s dumpling, a beetle’s faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man’s curse, a blasket, a ‘kur’, a fiddler’s occupational disease, a fairy godmother’s father, a hawk’s vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle’s ‘farm’, a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill …
Given that that is the case, if Dinneen had defined the word diadhánach as ‘the lonesomeness of a cow bereft of her calf’, it would not be at all surprising. However, it would also not necessarily prove that that is the real meaning of the word. Many things are defined quite differently by Dinneen and by other more accurate and less fanciful Irish dictionaries like Ó Dónaill.
However, the fact is that Magan has simply got it wrong. Not even Dinneen defined diadhánach as ‘the lonesomeness of a cow bereft of her calf’. What Dinneen does say is that diadhánach (which is an adjective), means ‘lonesome, as a cow bereft of her calf’. AS. In other words, here’s an example of the kind of lonesomeness. The lonesomeness of an animal or a person missing a loved-one. The lonesomeness of a widow for her dead husband. The lonesomeness of Bambi for his dead mother. The lonesomeness of Dante for Beatrice or Oisín for the Fianna or ET for the folks back home or Olive Oyle for Popeye when he’s away on a long voyage. However, it DOES NOT state or imply or suggest that diadhánach is ‘the word for the lonesomeness of a cow bereft of her calf’ because no language, including Irish, has or needs a word for that concept. WISE THE FUCK UP!
cassidyslangscam 
Manchán Magan has confused meaning and application. The fact that diadhánach means ‘lonesomeness’ and that someone has applied the word to a cow that has lost its calf does not allow one to conclude that it necessarily means *‘loneliness of a cow that has lost its calf’.
A related matter is whether zoologists know enough about cows to be able to say that those who have lost their calves feel or may feel lonesome. The danger of anthropomorphism is great (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism).
Hi David, Hope you are well. Yes, that is right. A similar case I’ve mentioned before (in a post called Is Irish a Superlanguage?) is that of faiteadh, which is a word for flapping or fluttering. It can describe a flag in the wind, or a bird, or an eyelid. Unfortunately, Dinneen’s definition also includes its use to describe the flapping of the arms used to warm yourself on a cold day, so among Irish learners, there is a myth that faiteadh is ‘the word for flapping your arms to warm yourself on a cold day’. As for anthropomorphism, this is typical of Magan’s thinking. Everything is mystical and New Age in Magan’s books. Fuadach (a bog-standard word for abduction or kidnapping), according to Magan, originally meant abduction by the fairies and the rest of us are somehow missing the point by not using it in that way. If you look up fuadach on sources like Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, the uses are all physical abduction by human beings! The term was certainly used for fairy abductions as well, but there is no evidence that this was its original or primary meaning! Again, Magan is just romanticising.
And I just found out tonight that one of Magan’s latest books contains the story of Ábhartach the Irish vampire demanding bowls of blood from his subjects. You know, the fake Irish vampire story invented by a couple of Englishmen in a book on Dracula in 1997? Such a humungous waste of space!