What's New
A short, easy-to-keep-up page for bulletins.
Any questions or comments? Please e-mail them to: Travellers' Rest
A little double dose of humor:
One for the kids:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Whoa.
Whoa who?
Whoa, whoa, whoa your boat, gently down the stream.
What's the difference between a stupid home-handyman and a smart one hanging pictures? The jerk one throws out
half the nails in a box because they're pointed at the wrong end. The other one tells him not to be stupid: they're
just for the other side of the wall.
The same two guys go to a lumberyard and the smarter handyman gives the jerk a list of what to buy while he waits in the truck. The stupid one goes in, looks at the list, and asks for 100 4X2s. The counterman asks,"2X4s?" "Wait a minute; I'll check." He goes out to the truck, asks, and comes back in, nodding. "Yup, them's 2X4s." The counterman asks, "How LONG did you want them?" The other says, "Wait a minute; I'll check," goes out, comes back and tells the man,"I'll need 'em for keeps. We're s'posed to build a house with 'em."
(:>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.)
The Cant:
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.
There is a new page linked to the Traveller/Shelta page, a pronunciation and phonetic spelling guide to be used in the creation of my forthcoming list of Shelta words.
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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