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On 25 April 1916, 2,000 Australian and New Zealand troops marched through London towards a service at Westminster Abbey attended by the King and Queen. One of the soldiers later recalled the celebratory atmosphere of the day. This was the first Anzac Day. A year earlier, Australian soldiers had been the first to land on the Gallipoli peninsula as part of an attempt by the combined forces of the British and French empires to invade the Ottoman Empire.

The post A tale of two cities: Anzac Day and the Easter Rising appeared first on OUPblog.

Remembering the Easter Rising has never been a straightforward business. The first anniversary of the insurrection, commemorated at the ruins of the General Post Office on Easter Monday, 1917, descended into a riot. This year its centenary has been marked by dignified ceremonies, the largest public history and cultural event ever staged in Ireland and, in Northern Ireland, political discord, and menacing shows of paramilitary strength. Over the past century, the Rising’s divisiveness has remained its most salient feature.

The post Remembering Easter 1916 in 2016 appeared first on OUPblog.

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising, a violent attempt by Irish republicans to end British rule in Ireland. Though a momentous event in itself, the Rising should be understood in the context of a decade of revolutionary activity during which Irish political culture was profoundly radicalised and partition came to look inevitable. It must also be understood in the context of the First World War.

The post 100 years after the Easter Rising appeared first on OUPblog.

The Tarts
The Queen of Hearts,
She made some tarts,
All on a summer's day;
The Knave of Hearts,
He stole the tarts,
And took them clean away.
The King of Hearts
Called for the tarts,
And beat the Knave full sore;
The Knave of Hearts
Brought back the tarts,
And vowed he'd steal no more. (107)

Sing a Song of Sixpence
Sing a song of sixpence,
a pocket full of rye;
Four-and-twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie!
When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing;
Was not that a dainty dish
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting-house
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlor,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes;
When down came a blackbird
And snapped off her nose. (62)

The Bunch of Blue Ribbons
Oh, dear what can the matter be?
Oh, dear what can the matter be?
Oh, dear what can the matter be?
Johnny's so long at the fair.
He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons,
He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons,
He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons,
To tie up my bonny brown hair. (127)

The Easter Rising of 1916 not only destroyed much of the center of Dublin – it changed the course of Irish history.  Yet basic questions about why the event occurred continue to divide historians.  In The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916, by Fearghal McGarry, we learn about the uprising from the perspective of those who made it.  McGarry makes use of a collection of over 1,700 eye-witness statements detailing the political activities of members of Sinn Féin and militant groups such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood.  In the excerpt below, we learn first-hand how it felt to walk off to war that morning.

The insurrection could not have begun in a more chaotic manner.  Mobilizers received less than an hour’s notice to alert their companies, a process that normally took at least four hours.  At 10 a.m. Liam Archer received an order to mobilize his section of the company – for 10 a.m.: “My first two calls at Jones Road and Clonliffe Road drew blanks, both members had gone out for the day.  At this point the motor cycle combination broke down…I set off on foot for Blackhall Place, giving up the idea of mobilising my Section’.  Seán Kennedy ‘only contacted those within reasonable walking distance’.  John Kenny ignored the mobilization order he received, joining his friends on an outing as ‘we were still sore about the fiasco of the previous day’.  The Third Battalion’s quartermaster told his mobilizer that he (like many other Volunteers and British army soldiers) was going to the Grand National horse race at Fairyhouse:  ‘I said to him: “What will the battalion do, they are depending on you?”  He said they would have to get a horse and car’.  In contrast, more zealous Volunteers were delighted that the day had finally come.  Annie Cooney recalled the excitement of Christy Byrne and Con Colbert, a former Chief Scout of the Fianna, who had devoted years of activism to bringing about an insurrection:

During the time I was buckling him up Con-who had not a note in his head-was singing ‘For Tone is coming back again’ he was so excited and charmed that at last the fight was coming off.  He thought of nothing else.  The pair went off, wheeling their bicycles which were loaded up with pikes, their rifles and small arms.

For many, the Rising was a family affair: fathers, brothers, sisters (and the occasional mother) fighting together.  Michael O’Flanagan was mobilized with his father and two brothers, one of whom was killed.  Molly Reynolds was joined by her father and three brothers.  Some parents were prepared to sacrifice their children for the cause.  Pat Fox thrust his young son-who was killed the following day-towards Frank Robbins as the rebels marched from Liberty Hall: ‘Here is my lad; take him with you for the Irish Citizen Army.  I am too old for the job’.  Some parents were willing to sacrifice themselves, leaving their children behind.  After the Rising, John MacDonagh ‘was struck by the sight of a wife keeping step with her husband, Séamus Murphy, both prisoners.  I knew both of them, and knew they had left their young children at home’.  Some were motivated to fight because of their children, as one eld

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, will be published by Perigee in July. In the post below Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, wonders what makes a dictionary “hardcore”.

There was an accidentally interesting discussion on the subject of orthography last week on Fox News. Hosts Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy were giving their learned opinions on spelling reform, and whether it was necessary. When it seemed to me that they were just about to decisively put an end to several hundred years of debate, Carlson suddenly interjected a new question into the conversation: “do they even sell hardcore dictionaries anymore…?You are doubtless thinking right now ‘what is a hardcore dictionary, and where can I find one?’ There are a number of ways to interpret the meaning of this word, and so before answering Carlson’s question we should perhaps examine some of them.

Mark Liberman, in an excellent post at Language Log, recommended Allen Walker Read’s study on graffiti, Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary. This is a good example of a hardcore dictionary since, as Liberman points out, the book was judged incendiary enough in the 1930s that it had to be privately printed.

If we are to assume that Carlson was using the word hardcore in the sense of ‘pornographic’ then she is in luck, as there are a great number of dictionaries that fall into this category. I think that the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang is pretty hardcore. So are Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word, and Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. In fact, the tradition of hardcore dictionaries in English lexicography goes back hundreds of years, with such gems as Sir Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (from 1785, but available in a modern reprint), and Henry Nathaniel Cary’s, The Slang of Venery and its Analogues, a two volume compilation of off-color words taken from 18th and 19th century dictionaries (privately printed in 1916 and unfortunately hard to find).

Although perhaps she meant hardcore as it is defined by the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary (‘2. Stubbornly resistant to improvement or change’)? There are a number of prescriptivist dictionaries available that resist the inevitable change of language.

I suppose there is always a chance that Carlson already owns the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and was referencing that work’s own definition of hardcore (‘hardened, tough, pitiless’). In that case I would recommend Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, which has all those qualities and more.

But maybe she meant hardcore as it is defined by the Harper Collins Dictionary of American Slang (‘essential and uncompromising’). There are a great number of dictionaries that I think are essential, and a few that are uncompromising as well. The 1916 version of The Century Dictionary comes to mind - this single volume work is over 8000 pages long (almost two feet tall when laid on its side), and so feels pretty uncompromising when you try to hold it in your lap. Plus, the publishers inexplicably chose to cover it in brown corduroy, which to me seems hardcore for a dictionary.

What if she had recently been reading The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green, and liked his definition of ‘…serious, committed, experienced, full-time…’? If this is what she meant then she can walk into almost any bookstore in the world and find that they most likely will sell a dictionary that meets these criteria. So no matter what meaning of the word was intended the answer is yes, Carlson, they do still sell hardcore dictionaries.

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