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Bah! What's with all these amateurish alcoholics who don't even know how to spell their patron saint's professional binge-drinking day nameslake?
It really gets my goat. My initial response (aside from my knee jerking so hard so as to render myself unconscious from a self-inflicted blow to the chin), is who's she? She? Baaaaa?
Did St. Patrick undergo a sex change? A sea change? Was he Swedish? A cloned sheep? No, that was Dolly. We do know that Patrick had a thing for pigs, not sheep. At 15, when most kids were fooling around in the bushes, he was captured by Irish pirates, and became a slave.
An Antrim chieftain named Miliucc (his name sounds suspiciously similar to the Irish word for pig—muc, as in mucky. Anyway, Miliucc called Patrick "Succat." (That's Irish for sucker—not.) Probably because that was his real name: Maewyn Succat. It means warlike in proto-Welsh. He'd have to be, considering besotted Americans would be calling him Patty some 1500 years hence.
Maewyn Succat (he wasn't yet baptized Patricius) was a swineherd for seven years in the mountains of mourn—er, Antrim, with nobody to talk to except them little piggsies. Maewyn-Patrick-Succat was off gamboling with the jamóns for seven long years? Helloooo Dolly! Can you say rashers of bacon?
The Irish word for pig muc, comes from the Old Irish word for pig, which is socc (soch/suck). Sounds suspiciously like Succat, doesn't it. Being called a pig or boar in Irish or Welsh (trwch) wasn't a bad thing in the pre-medieval ages. The pig, or boar, was considered a sacred animal. You're on the pig's back now means you're on a roll. Of course, nobody could say trwch in Welsh without sneezing or sounding like a pig. Better than being called sucker!
How the little piggsies (that's banw in Welsh) ever taught Maewyn-Patrick to speak Irish, remains a mystery. They must've been very talented swine. Perhaps they were bilingual? You may well ask: seven years? So, what's time to a pig? Maewyn-Patrick was 21, far from home, and he readily admitted to hearing voices on or in the hillside. Holy Leaping Schizophrenics, Gilligan! No wonder he drove all the snakes from Ireland. They didn't speak Oirish like the pigs. Or they weren't speaking to the pigs at all, so they got eaten.
I know St. Patrick had a cross to bear trying to convert the so-called heathen Irish to Christianity—but, ferfeckakes, not TWO of them. (No matter that Palladius was already busy converting the Irish when Patrick was still wet behind the ears.) I digress. Not PaTTy (see the two crosses?), but PaDDy. As in a DruiD. Was it some loose canon (stet) of a TT stutttttttering off somebody's keyboard to blame, or what?
How did this glaring "T" typo snake its way to these clemented shores of Amerikay? Maybe it's derived from the baby hand-jive, patticake. Or maybe it's from slinging hamburger. Gimme a patty. Raw. Hold the curly shamrocks, Babycakes!
it's PaDDy—not Patty—ever! Patty is a girl's nickname. Got it? St. Patrick was not one billion McDonald's burgers served either—which is probably the natal spawning ground of this blaring typo. Blame it on those preliterate generations raised on Big Macs. Paddy is not necessarily a derogatory term. It's a man's (diminutive) nickname, or pet name.
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But there were too many Patricks and Patricias in the family. Patsy's cousin was a Patsy too. Their sons were Paddys. Paddies and Patsies. Yup. We tend to flip the dimunitives every other generation. Works like a charm until they begin to overlap. Then we're right fecked.
Our family is rather name-challenged—we keep recycling the same handful of names over and over. Even the girls are called Patsy. (Not Patty!) Causes massive confusion in the family tree. We just know we're all related. But not exactly how. Sort of like a Kentucky Family Tree—you know, straight up, only ours is horizontal. Or maybe it's drowning itself neat in affrontal lobotomy of uisce beatha. But that's fodder for an-udder blogger.
Imagine being a cowboy called Patsy in the wild, wild and wooly west of Nevada. Yep. That was my rellie. I suspect some serious bar room brawls were in order. It's sort of like a Boy Named Sue. Paddy was also called The Boss. But trust me, no one called any of my relatives—male or female, Patty! Ever. So we tend to take umbrage rather easily.
Call it Saint Patrick's Day? Grand. It's all right and proper. (You may also genuflect here—a full knee drop, if you please, at the bar of your choosing—not some pannywaist half-knee crick or, gawdforbid, a curtsy—though royalty is invoked.)
Call it Paddy's Day? It'll do; but don't forget the St. part. As in saint, not street. Or Paddywagon. Get it?
St. Pat's? Och aye, if ye must.
St. Patty? NO feckin' way, ye illiterate goats! Bahhh! Maaaa?
It's enough to make and Irish(wo)man to take up flinging pigshit or cow paddies or worse, become bullish and see red—er, make that green. No wait, that's a river in Chicago. (No, not in back alleys. The real river. They dye it green.) Enough to get your knickers in a twist.
Beides, have you ever heard of a police prisoner transport vehicle referred to as a Patty wagon? I think not. Black Maria, maybe.
As my Irish teacher, Joe Nugent from Mullingar would say: We'll have one o' that fookin' shamrockery here!
Then, when that pissy "P" was borrowed from the Britons, it became Pádraic, or Pádraig, in Middle Irish, depending upon the millennium you're speaking from. And then it was rounded up to Patricius in Latin. Or AtriciusPay in Pig-Latin.
Qatrikias, you ask? Yes, well, you know that James Joyce, in Finnegan's Wake, invented the word "quark," that sound a beer makes while sliding down a man's throat. Maybe Jammsie was trying to say Patrick while slaking his powerful thirst and it came out Qatrikias.
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
And the name is Patrick in the Anguish bearla. Patrick is a much later Anglicization of his name by way of Welsh—they being overfond of pissy "P' sounds. P/Q Celtic = consider it a lisp synch thang.
And since Americans sometimes call girls by the diminutive Patty, some right eejits erroneously assumed that was how Patrick was also spelled. Nope. It's Paddy. As in an Irisher—a Paddy or a Mick.
What makes it all so funny is that St. Pádraic, or Old Adze-head, as he was referred to in the Middle Ages, wasn't even Oirish! He was a Romanized Strathclyde Briton (think Scotland/ Cumbria—perhaps born in DunBarton on the River Clyde—which means Fort of the Britons) and he had to LEARN Irish to speak to the natives. Remember the pigs?
It's Paddy, not Patty. Got it? (Cow paddies aside.)
My guinness I think I'll have a goodness.
Thank you. I feel better now.
It was the Fairfax Brewfest Patty poster that sent me over the deep end. In recompense, for this great offense, I should ask them for a free beerpass (all you can drink). I'd happily drown my sorrows there this weekend, but alas, I have to work.
Some of this material was shamelessly lifted from the Paddy, not Patty site. All credit for this rant goes to them. The bar tab too. You can Tweet him at
Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig.
For what it's worth, this twisted Patrick stuff is an old goat of mine: in 1996, I took on Dear Abby for some twaddle about Patrick being a Roman, and his mum, an Englishwoman, etc. Like the Corinthians, she never wrote back. I might add, that in those days, my Celtic research was done by hand, with real books—pre internet.
For more reverent information on some historical background related to St. Patrick, see my post St. Patrick was a Strathclyde Briton.
Home Ranch, Reese River Valley—Paddy Walsh
THE VIKING IRISH REDHEAD GENE MYTH—my most popular blogpost—19,000 hits and counting) which ultimately was derived from the Scottish Lassie's spiteful flame-mails.
Red-headed Step-children—I took the Scottish Lassie's vitriol to task in another blog post. I tried to be gentle, and educational, but she'd have none of it. She was pretty attached to her bigotry.
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