cur

sionnach commented on the word cur

Excerpt from "The Best of Myles" wherein he holds forth on the Irish language:

While the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000. Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up all day with an Irish-speaking bore...

.... The 400/4000 ratio is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish language ... that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meetings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts.... Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic licence, oxymoron, Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddywhackery and it is a safe bet you will find yourself very far from home. Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self:

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 badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprachauns 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 corncrakes clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustmans dumpling, a beetles faggot, the act of loading ever rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddlers occupational disease, a fairy godmothers father, a hawks vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottles 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill, a fair day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoats stomach-pump, a broken-

But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.

Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big. If it's small, it's a boat, and if it's big it's a ship. In his great book

i An tOileanach (The Islander)

the uneducated Tomas O Criomhthain uses, perhaps, a dozen words to convey the concept of varying super-marinity:

i arthrach long, soitheach, bad, naomhog, bad raice, galbhad, pucan

and whatever you are having yourself.

The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads may be imagined when i say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a lifetime. Their life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are.

October 15, 2007

yarb commented on the word cur

Woah! I read that in 'The Best of Myles' just the other day!

November 24, 2007

bilby commented on the word cur

Australia was scandalised when, on 11-11-1975, then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was effectively dismissed by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. Wot, the PM sacked? How could it be? Whitlam knew that Opposition leader Fraser had been plotting against him. But he was livid when he found out the lengths that his nemesis had gone to. A very terse official read a statement from the G-G to the effect that both houses of parliament had been dissolved and Fraser was caretaker PM until an election could be held. Whitlam, a very ponderous but theatrical character, took up a position on the steps of Parliament House and addressed the media.

Whitlam: "The proclamation you have just heard read by the Governor-General's official secretary was countersigned ... Malcolm Fraser ... who will go down in Australian history, from Remembrance Day 1975 onwards, as Kerr's cur."

I don't think the meaning he had in mind was leprechaun's denture or stoat's stomach-pump, but the temptation to give such a reading is building!

November 24, 2007

uselessness commented on the word cur

According to Orson Scott Card (by way of Guybrush Threepwood), this is the end of the road, and you are a gutter-crawling cur.

November 25, 2007