St Patrick’s Day – March 17th

March 17, 2009 | Posted by profanglais

I’m English, but most of my ancestors were Irish immigrants. My paternal grandmother was from Kinsale in the south of Ireland, and my mother’s maiden name was ‘Kelly’, a typical Irish surname. My surname, Lewis, is very common in Wales, thus making me far more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon.

It was commonly believed that the Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians) and later the Vikings, pushed the indigenous Celts to the northern and western extremities of the British Isles. Recent DNA tests on English men, even those living in the region called East Anglia, have shown that nearly all of them have some Celtic blood. This indicates that inter-marrying was more common than we thought.

The Celts were the original inhabitants of the British Isles, not the anglo-saxons. Being a ‘pure’ Englishman or woman (an Anglo-Saxon) today means being in fact an immigrant. So my family was here in Britain long before the families of many today who complain so much about immigration – but they are immigrants too, just like everyone else!

Unfortunately, the Celts were not able to have too much influence on the new arrivals’ language. English today is a mix of mostly Germanic and Latin words, with little room for Celtic words. The Celtic words in use today have entered the English language within the last hundred years or so.

If you are celebrating St Patrick’s day in an Irish Pub, here are a few Irish words that you might like to use:

banshee : a wailing ghost, “fairy woman”
bard : a poet
crack : fun
Ceilidh pronounced ‘kay-lee’): Irish traditional music, for dancing
phoney : false, fake, not real,
Shamrock : clover (tréfle)
Shenanigans: mischief, bad behavior – “I’ll have no shenanigans from you”
Shillelagh (pronounced ‘she-lay-lee’): big stick
smithereens : small pieces, “it was smashed into smithereens”
Whisky!