Word: blarney
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Jimmy Breslin's book, which bristles with anecdotes and is embellished with Irish blarney, is the best...
Priest and Peasant. He is not indulgent. The book remorselessly records a people drowning in paradox and blarney. Smothering religious piety coexists with savage sectarian hatreds. The calamitous failure of subsistence farming in the 19th century has ensured the preservation of exactly the same kind of subsistence farming in the present. Blessed with a shore line that attracts international trawlers, Ireland has never launched a fishing industry. "Socialism," O'Hanlon writes, "is a nasty word in Ireland, yet it is difficult to think of a non-socialist economic structure where the government's presence is so pervasive...
...political style is dead. It should be buried, particularly by Presidents. Everybody except the politicians seems to sense that. Hoopla, frantic flying, blarney about peace and prosperity are worthless. Worse, they are laughable...
With McCormack as his patron, O'Neill soon entered the inner circle of the House, where his blarney and good fellowship made him a quick favorite. O'Neill regularly attended the select meetings of Sam Rayburn's "board of education," afterhours sessions in the Speaker's office where the likes of Lyndon Johnson, Albert and McCormack met over bourbon to discuss the business of Congress...
...string of novels that began in 1956 with The Straight and Narrow Path, Honor Tracy has made a particular corner of Ireland her own. It might be called County Farce. It lies just this side of the Dire Straits, along the border of Blarney. It is peopled with grotesques, inanimate as well as animate: crumbling mansions where the plumbing has a will-but not a constitution -of iron; a Hereford bull that for reasons of its own sits down in a kitchen, blockading the stove; an alcoholic postman who carelessly stuffs mail into a tree stump, then thinks to bring...