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Any questions or comments? Please e-mail them to: Travellers' Rest
A little cold weather humor:
Two contractors were working for a while in Wisconsin one winter, far away from their families.
They rented some ice-fishing gear on a Saturday, figuring they would try their hand at it over the weekend. But first they spent a few hours gargling dinner at a local bar until they noticed it was getting late. So after stocking up on more Southern Comfort to-go, the tipsy men drove drunkenly away and eventually found themselves what appeared to be a good spot to set up.
One started to chop a hole in the ice while the other man tried to assemble the hut.
All of a sudden, a ray of light beamed down on them from on high and a deep, very loud and angry, voice proclaimed all about them: "Is this the way you prepare for the Lord's Day?"
Both men stammered and fell to their knees in shock. One said, "We were just fishing, honest."
The same deep voice boomed: "You unregenerate drunkards! You will find no fish below."
Both men were shaking, but one asked, "How do you know? Are you the Lord of All?"
The voice from on high replied: "Not quite all, you bums; just this hockey rink."
(:>D)
Links:
The promised Links to Irish Traveller and Related Sites page has been added. It can be normally accessed by clicking on its own link from the "Travellers" page. And the "Travellers" page is listed as the first link on the navigation bars at the top and bottom of each page on this web site.
Don't be surprised to see several references to "Gypsy" on the list. There are three reasons for its presence. First: In many European countries, some Traveller groups are considered "Gypsies" as a generic term, and in other countries, various tribes of the Romany are considered "Travellers." Second: The various Romany sites, such as the Patrin, maintain excellent documentation and linkages about the Irish, Scots and English (Romanichal) Travellers as a courtesy to our peoples. Third: The "Gypsy" sites are well worth examining for their own sake; interesting, entertaining, informative and technically excellent as well.
These links will be expanded and otherwise maintained. If you find any that have moved or dropped out, please e-mail me about them and I'll take care of it.
An old benediction:
I just thanked a kind Irish Traveller, who had sent me an e-mail Thanksgiving message, with my own reply in the Shelta (old-time Cant) that was used when our families arrived in this country. As in any language, and it was a complete language, Shelta had a number of ways to say the same things. In this case I chose the most literal way to make for easier association with the translation, word by word. Then, on reflection, I thought that others might be interested as well:
Mwil nyok duilsha munyaths a Dalyon Swuda.
(I wish you blessings from God Almighty.)
Yeats:
From "The Ballad of Wandering Aengus"; perhaps this is what happens when a country man falls hopelessly in love with a Traveller girl.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
A note on the site's name, "Travellers' Rest":
In addition to being a common old reference to a sojourn for travelers who are not Travellers, if you get my drift, there is an historic connection. I believe that "Travellers' Rest" was the name given to the grove in North Augusta, SC, where virtually all Irish-American Traveller ancestors once camped together. This was before our families had fully formed into the various geographical clans of Irish Travellers that exist today. In later times, when the land was purchased and turned into a trailer and mobile home park, the campground was renamed "The Pines."
(12/13/98) Bubby reminded me, via e-mail, that a number of Irish Travellers, notably many of the Western Travellers as well as others, pretty much bypassed the east coast on their way to Fort Worth, TX. Other families perhaps arrived later than the time that I describe. So I should rephrase the above, at the very least, to claim that many Irish-American Travellers have some ancestors who, once upon a time, camped at Travellers' Rest in South Carolina.
I am relying on one written but indirect source here about the name of that campsite. And an old Burke family legend lends support to the contention that at least some of the McDonalds among the Western Travellers and some of the McDonalds among the Northern Travellers have common ancestors going back to my great-great grandfather and that they still formed a family group when they arrived in this country. This would have been not all that long after the Civil War and, of course, lots of families not named McDonald might have had a male or female named McDonald in their lineage since then as well. From what I've heard, many of the Northern Travellers and Southern Travellers have similar shared roots if we can check back that far. Maybe so; maybe not.
As always, if you've got some information to share or a strong opinion (pro or con) e-mail me at: Travellers' Rest. Please specify, though, whether you would prefer that your name and e-mail address be posted or not. Otherwise, if you supply a nickname, that's how I will attribute your contribution.
I expect that there will be disagreement by some Travellers with a few
of the statements I make below. I want to make it quite clear that I speak only for myself. If you disagree, and
have a point to make, E-mail me here and I'll present it on this page for all to see and consider.
The Cant:
There are three words used fairly interchangeably as names for overlapping subsets of the whole Irish Travellers' language: The Cant, Shelta and Gammon. I know where the names come from and how to pronounce them but I'm not altogether sure that even experts agree on what distinctions should be made between them or where all of the words belong.
At this point, however, I find it critical to make some important distinctions in that language for my own purposes. You'll see why in a minute. So I am going to define them simply:
When I use "Cant," I refer only to those words used privately by Irish Travellers in America today;
When I use "Gammon," I refer only to those words used privately by Irish Travellers in Ireland today;
When I use "Shelta," I refer only to those words used privately by all Irish Travellers in Ireland and America around 1875 A.D.. By "words used privately," I refer only to language not shared with "country people."
I am sure that the usages outlined above are not correct technically but I think that they are suitable for us
because, frankly, we're not technical experts but it is our language and we can call it any damn thing we want
to. In the USA we call it "The Cant" anyway, and I understand most Travellers in Ireland prefer "Gammon" as well. But for Irish Travellers in the USA, "Gammon," as I define it here, is basically not relevant. They've lost some
of the old Shelta in Ireland too, and whatever new words have
been formed there since our people left can only be of academic significance on this side.
Why are the distinctions important then? By my estimation, there are now less than 200 Cant words among us all in America. The average Irish-American Traveller has maybe 100 or 150 at his or her command, I think, at most. But only one hundred twenty-five years ago there was probably much more Shelta used by our forefathers than even the thousand or so basic words that were written down by researchers like Leland and Sampson.
We've lost all the rest, 80% or more, in less than four generations. Who among us can promise that we won't lose the rest even faster?
Yet there is a definite disapproval among Irish-American Travellers when any discussion of writing down the rest of The Cant for posterity comes up.
Okay, what do we do?
Here's what I'm going to do:
I am going to take my best shot at reproducing the Shelta spoken in the old days; strip out any modern Cant from that list to preserve its "secrecy," and post the rest. Hopefully that final list will contain most of the words that we've lost; although the pronunciation is going to be "by guess and by golly." At the same time, those that you would rather not see written down here won't be. We can keep them to ourselves and all make believe that that there isn't a list of most of them in print already.
Now what you all do with those current Cant and the new/old words, Shelta, is not my problem. I'd like to hope, though, that some among you will find a few of the Shelta entries useful, or at least interesting, and will add one or two at a time to The Cant. It would be nice to see the old language grow for a change, instead of shrink.
It might take me a couple of weeks; it might take a month. So if you want to get your opinion on record before then, e-mail me with it. I can't promise that I'll print all of them, but they won't be ignored and the gist of your comments, at least, will be fairly presented here.
Progress on this lexicon can be tracked by selecting "Travellers" and then "Shelta" to get to the right page; or just click on the following: Shelta
The proverbial "Tinker's Dam":
There could not be another expression that better demonstrates the "vicious circle" concept, except perhaps for "Indian giver." If you look it up in almost any dictionary, you find it basically defined as "worthless," and probably arising from the "well-known" tendency of tinkers to curse so much that a single one of their "damns" would be so commonplace as to be insignificant. And if you try to find out why tinkers are assumed to have cursed so much, you'll find that the "experts" point to such sayings as evidence that it was so.
Let's think on that for a moment. There are a number of fine curses and obscenities in Shelta. The Shelta words for "tinker's damn" (in the sense of curse) were Minkar's Laburth, by the way. But how would country people distinguish curses from the rest of the Shelta that they heard? And how much public cursing could a tinker do in the presence of generally hostile strangers before he and his family would be run out of town?
Oddly enough, there's a very simple explanation which most authorities refuse to endorse and even characterize as belated political correctness. In his repair work, the tinker frequently used mud to mold reservoirs and barriers. When dry, these would channel molten tin solder into the appropriate parts of the article he was repairing. They were called "dams" and when the tin had cooled and they had no further purpose, each "tinker's dam" was easily broken into little clumps of useless dirt.
I believe that "tinker's dam" and "tinker's damn" sound very similar in Gaelic as well as English. My guess is that Irish householders and Irish servants who dealt with tinkers knew they were referring to a "tinker's dam" when they used that phrase. It was the English landlords and administrators overhearing them who assumed, in prejudice and ignorance, that "damn" was the reference. And it was the English, after all, who wrote the English dictionaries.
They even claim that the expression was first encountered in 1839, although tinkers' dams have probably been in use for much longer than a thousand years. The melting point of tin, by the way, is just under the temperature of burning paper so there was no need for high-tech equipment to accomplish that.
What's the promised connection with safecracking? When nitroglycerine was invented, safecrackers borrowed the idea of the tinker's dam to channel it into the space between the safe door and its frame. That way, when it blew, most of the nitro would be behind the safe door, blowing it outwards.
Sad to say: if it was a tinker who first employed the dam in this way, he immediately rose a number of notches in the social scale of those benighted times by becoming a "yegg," or safecracker. It is interesting to note that one old Shelta word for "tin" was similar: yergan. One possible translation for "dam" might be bwikader, meaning "holder" or "container," but that's a blind guess, of course. If anyone might know the exact Cant or Shelta expression, I'd appreciate an e-mail about it.
Coming Attractions:
A few more Shelta words from Old Times in the Old Country, of course.
There will be a new joke, if a good one comes my way.
By the way, any poetry on these pages that is not attributed to another person was written by myself and is copyrighted as such.
Any questions or comments? Please e-mail them to: Travellers' Rest
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