Q: I’m rereading Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes and came across something that has always puzzled me. Teresa suggests to Miss Pym that they get coffee at a teashop called The Teapot. Miss Pym replies, “A little Hibernian, surely?” Can you enlighten me as to what Miss Pym means?
A: We think Josephine Tey is using “Hibernian” here to mean “Irish,” which has had the colloquial sense of illogical or paradoxical for several centuries. In Miss Pym Disposes, the paradox is going for coffee at a teashop.
The oldest of these terms is the adjective “Irish,” which was spelled yriscan (roughly UR-iss-kahn) when it appeared in Old English and referred to a native of Ireland. The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a passage in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 1055:
“Hig gegaderadan ða mycle fyrde mid ðam yriscan mannan & mid Walkynne” (“They gathered then a great army with the Irish men and with the Welsh men”).
The OED says a “somewhat offensive” colloquial sense of “Irish” appeared in the early 19th century and referred to “a statement or action” that was “paradoxical; illogical or apparently so.”
The dictionary’s earliest citation, which we’ve expanded, is in a letter dated Feb. 5, 1820, from Henry Peter Brougham, a Whig Member of Parliament, to Thomas Creevey, a Whig politician.
In the letter, Brougham responds to a suggestion by Creevey that he send a courier to Queen Caroline by saying he has already sent one, and then apologizing parenthetically for the clumsiness of his wording:
“Your advice has been followed by anticipation (to speak Irish); at this moment my courier is within a couple of days’ journey of the Queen.” From the The Creevey Papers (1903), edited by Herbert Maxwell.
However, the word “Irish” had been used similarly in the noun phrase “Irish bull,” which the OED says appeared nearly a century earlier and referred to “a statement which is manifestly self-contradictory or inconsistent, esp. to humorous effect.” The dictionary notes that this usage is “now likely to be considered offensive.”
The first Oxford example is from the title of a poem by the Irish poet Mary Barber: “To the Right Honourable the Earl of Thormond, at Bath; who Charg’d the Author with Making an Irish Bull.” In the poem, she reminds the Earl of his own Irish heritage and says it’s unbecoming of him to mock the speech of his native island.
The OED says the noun “bull” in “Irish bull” is “of unknown origin,” but it notes that boul in Old French meant fraud, deceit, or trickery, while the noun “bull” in Middle English meant a falsehood and the verb “bull” meant to fool, mock, or cheat.
In early modern English, the dictionary says, the noun “bull” took on the sense “a self-contradictory proposition” and “in modern use, an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker.”
The first OED citation for the noun used this way is from The Antipodes: a Comedie (1640), by the British playwright Richard Brome: “Dumbe Speaker! that’s a Bull.” (Brome later puns on “bull” by using it in the bovine sense.)
Getting back to your question, when the adjective “Hibernian” appeared in early modern English, it meant, as it usually means today, “of or belonging to Ireland; Irish,” according to the OED. The dictionary’s first citation is from a book by the Scottish writer William Lithgow about his travels:
“The conscionable carriage of the Hybernian Clergy.” From The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Aduentures, and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Trauayles, from Scotland, to the Most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Affrica, (1632).
But in the dictionary’s next citation, Alexander Pope uses “Hibernian” in the sense you’re asking about. Pope uses the adjective in referring to a passage, later corrected, in his poem “An Essay on Criticism”: “ ’Tis right Hibernian, and I confess it what the English call a bull” (in a letter dated June 25, 1711, from Pope to John Caryl).
We hope we’ve helped you dispose of your confusion over the use of “Hibernian” in Miss Pym Disposes.
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