In 1847, a group of Irishmen who had emigrated to the United States and then signed up for a year’s service in the Mexican War decided to change sides. Let me try to explain why. Ireland was then in the worst year of the potato blight that crippled the nation for decades to come, and relations between the Irish and the English were as bad as they could be. Poor tenant farmers were dying of starvation, especially the children, and more than a million Irish literally fled for their lives. Many came to the United States and Canada, so it’s no surprise that when the United States went to war with Mexico, almost half of General Zachary Taylor’s infantry forces had been born in another country, and many of those had been born in Ireland. They were not exactly welcomed in New England and New York, where they tended to settle first. So when these men, most of whom were not American citizens, came to Mexico, they thought they had a lot more in common with the Mexicans than with their American officers, in religion and family life. Under their leader John Riley, they formed the Batallon de San Patrizio, Saint Patrick’s Batallion, and they fought energetically in the bloodiest battles of the war. Riley designed a banner for the batallion, featuring a harp — of course! — with the figure of an angel, a wreath of shamrocks — of course! — and the legend, “Erin Go Bragh,” meaning Ireland Forever. Erin, or Eirinn, is the old dative case for the name of Ireland; go is a preposition meaning unto, and Bragh is an Anglicized spelling of the word Brath. That’s from an Old Irish word, bratus, meaning Judgment (Day).
When I was a boy, I saw and heard Erin Go Bragh on Saint Patrick's Day, because our town had been built by Irishmen fleeing that poverty-stricken land, and working the coal mines here. Everybody got into the celebration — Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians. The boys would wear green shirts or slacks, and the girls (who had uniforms; ours was a Catholic school) would sport a green headband or beret. Mr. Kelly, who ran the local creamery from which we got our cartons of milk for lunchtime, would dye his hair bright green in honor of the day. One of the stained glass windows in our church shows Saint Patrick himself, as a bishop with his mitre and crozier, baptizing a barefoot peasant man, and green dominates the window. There’s also an inset of a shamrock, because legend has it that Patrick used that three-leafed clover to illustrate to the Irishmen the doctrine of the Trinity. The shamrock is English for the Irish semrog (pronounced shem-rog), meaning little clover.
But back to the motto! If you round your lips really tight, and make as if to pronounce gr, you can see and feel and hear how, if the lips just touch each other, you end up pronouncing br. So Irish brath is a cousin of Latin gratus, that really influential word that implies freedom, favor, gratitude, grace. It implies a favorable judgment, you see. And that’s how we get from that idea to Judgment Day, and of course it’s only a step from there to forever.
Plenty of Irish words have entered English, and some of the most colorful of them have to do with their folklore. Everybody knows about the leprechaun, whom you’re supposed to surprise and catch and keep hold of, so he’ll lead you to his pot of gold. But if you lose him, you may be forgiven if you burst out into wailing like a banshee. And what’s a banshee? She’s the bean si, (pronounced bawn shee) literally the woman of the mound, that is, a fairy of the mound where she sits. The banshee cries and sings and wails, to mark the death of a family member, and sometimes she’s a little old lady with long stringy hair — a really little old lady, a foot or two in height. Now then, remember what I just had you do to turn a g into a b? That happened here too. The old Indo-European root word for woman, gwn-, shows up in Greek as gyne, as in the English coinage gynecology, the study of women’s health, and it shows up in Old English as cwen, which became our word queen; but in Swedish, the related word kvinna simply means woman. There you have it: queen, gynecology, and banshee are all cousins. Who’d have thought? I don’t know if there ever was a queen of the banshees who needed a doctor when she was having a baby, but if there was, all the words could come into play.
What does an Irishman drink on Saint Patrick’s Day? The Knights of Father Mathew didn’t — there was a big chapter of them in my hometown a hundred years ago. They were a temperance society. But others might take a drop of “the creature,” as they called it — whiskey. That English word comes from the first part of the Irish uisce beatha, which was the Irish way of rendering Latin aqua vitae, water of life. The first part of that is a distant cousin of English water, Greek hydor (the element hydrogen is literally the water-maker), Russian voda (vodka is the affectionate diminutive), Hittite watar. The second part, the beatha, from an ancient root gwehw-, alive, is yet again an example of an original g turning to b. Here it turned to b also in Greek, so bios, life, is a cousin, but so is Latin vivus, and so is Old English cwic, meaning alive — Modern English quick.
So now I have to imagine a banshee drinking whiskey while sitting on a tuft of shamrocks, and shouting, Erin go bragh! Hmm — I think I’d rather imagine the good old Saint Patrick treading those deep green valleys, and bringing to the Irish the good news, which the Irish themselves would go and bring to the rest of the world. Here’s to you all, my Irish friends!
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