Word: gaelic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Flanagan's forte is his cast-some of them historical characters, others fictive-each invested with a complex, fascinating personality. Here is the reluctant scribe of rebellion, Owen Ruagh MacCarthy, a vagabond poet who scrounges a living by running an outlaw school, reciting his Gaelic verses in the houses of the rich and pursuing neutral grain spirits and colleens with unflagging energy. Here, in the cool rationality of Moore Hall, is MacCarthy's fellow Catholic and countryman George Moore, historian of the French Revolution and Cassandra of its Irish offspring, dreading that "the spirit of Rousseau...
...lusty cry that roused the Highlanders of ancient Scotland for battle was called a sluagh-gairm. A combination of the Gaelic words for host and cry, this rallying shout became slogorne in English and was over generations altered into sluggorne, slughorn, slogurn and other variants, including slogen. From that came the modern word that embraces those catch phrases, mottoes, aphorisms and partisan whoops that are continually coined and used by every segment of society, from politicians to Boy Scouts to terrorists. Slogans are, in fact, as common as chitchat...
...some arcane connections. Sources for songs include Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, "an acquaintance with a few local seals, and a series of very striking dreams" that provide Bok with images of burnt skies and a world ruled by wind. He seasons his shanties with Gaelic and Eskimo and has attempted a Mongolian tune now and again too. "I don't sing anything I don't understand," Bok says. "But the Mongolians I learned these songs from didn't understand them too well either...
...country that was for so long at the bottom of the heap in job creation is now so close to the top. The country is Ireland; its method of generating employment is to lure private investment, mostly from the U.S.; and its Pied Piper for industry is a former Gaelic football and hurling player, Michael Killeen. He is a man of Donegal, that scenic but tragic county in Ireland's west that sent so many of its youth to America (including four of Killeen's uncles and aunts) because they could not find work. Today...
Kennedy does not have to probe very deeply to find in Daley the spirit of an Irish warrior chieftain. Gaelic legend has a mother feeding the weaning morsel to such an infant with the tip of his father's sword: no better means to teach the proper ways of life and death. To Daley, politics was unremitting combat. Once attained, power could not be shared because sharing would tempt others to become chieftains...