Word: sassenachs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Sassenach trick. Unable to pronounce Gaelic names, Edward IV issued an order in 1465 requiring all Irishmen to take "an English surname of one towne, as Sutton, Chester . . . or art or science ... or office, as cook, butler." Though the law was generally ignored, the Irish did find it expedient to Anglicize their names. In the proud name O Ceallaigh, for example, the O was dropped, hard Irish c became k, the guttural aigh softened to y; and the result was Kelly. Many Eire patriots are now reversing the process, with Murphy re-emerging as O Murchadha, and Moriarty...
Most Dubliners, regarding the show as a mere Sassenach shindig, stayed away. Some attended for a side attraction: "We go for the cigarets," said a Dubliner, who explained that tobacco was short in town, and the horse show was the sort of place where smokes might be handed round...
...good harpist at the Royal Dublin Society's concert, but she was a Russian. Besides, said another, the traditional harp of the great Brian Boru had 30 strings, and this heraldic harp had only 15, for all that they were silver. And anyway, wasn't it the Sassenach heretic King Henry VIII who made the harp Ireland's official symbol in the first place when he decided that the three crowns of ancient Ireland looked too much like a Popish tiara...
...less outlandish and surprising than if Finn MacCool, his long-legged self, had turned around in the middle of his runnin' lep from the Giant's Causeway and said: "The Sassenach are a fine, fair-minded and glorious people...
...just to keep the anti-Sassenach franchise, the Irish Government in the same week banned as unfit for Eireannachs to read a book called The Threshold of Marriage. The book was published by the Church of England...