Tonight there’s no wind to speak of, but it’s definitely the
wettest of the winter so far. The road outside was a river again when I went
for a walk, so when I got back I ignored my state of bedragglement, fetched a
spade, and cleared the drain that takes most of the water coming downhill past
the school. Is that being properly civically dutiful? I would say so.
And while I was out I checked the state of the culvert by
the Lady B’s place. It was less than half full, so that’s OK. There’s no danger
of her being washed into the River Dove and finding herself at five o’clock in
the morning doing the Saxon trip backwards en route to the North Sea.
But onto more interesting matters…
Mel was saying to me last night how disappointed she is with
Jean Butler’s name. It just isn’t fit and proper for somebody who is so lovely,
dances so divinely, and is Irish, for
heaven’s sake!
I agreed. It isn’t. She should be called Sorcha O’Riordan,
or Aisling McDonal, or even Kaetlyn McCafferty. Coming from New York is no excuse for not having a
proper Irish name. There were women called Jean Butler in the street in an
English industrial city where I grew up. Well, there might have been; it’s that
sort of name.
4 comments:
My name is more Irish than Jean Butler's and I'm only 1/32 Irish.
My name at birth was Godwin, which is one of the oldest of Anglo-Saxon personal names. But I discovered that it can also be an Anglicization of an Irish Gaelic name, and circumstantial evidence suggests it probably was.
The name of Butler in Irish is
de Buitleir.
I think the problem here is what I gather happened at the time when it was popular for the Irish to anglicise their surnames. Some simply changed the spelling to make it more ‘anglo,’ but the name remained exclusively, and therefore recognisably, Irish. This is the case with names like Connolly, Riley and Kelly. Others, however, converted their name to an existing English one with similar spelling – hence Butler and Godwin. And that’s why, to an English ear, the name Jean Butler sounds too mundanely English to fit the star of a theatre production about the Irish diaspora.
Ironically, of course, the name Butler comes originally from Norman French. I don’t know whether de Buitlear has the same root.
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