Encoding Ireland: Dictionaries and Politics in Irish History

I   to Terry Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (), Tom Paulin uses Heaney’s “North” to illustrate the “movement and formation of language” which he characterizes as a matter of historical struggle, “heavy with violence, atavism, the memory of later invasions, and pitched battles.”1 In contrast to this fraught, difficult, unceasing process, the texts which attempt to record its results are optimistic and eirenic: dictionaries “represent peace and plenty, and a delighted unaggressive confidence in the words, phrases, usages, and grammatical structures they catalogue.”2 For Paulin dictionaries celebrate in an uncomplicated way the bounty of a language, marking the felicitous self-belief of those who use a particular vocabulary by means of uncontentious transcripts of lexical usage. It is an appealing account, and anyone who has enjoyed the pleasures of looking up a word in a major work of lexicography must feel its attraction. Among the recognizable delights of large dictionaries are finding the hidden histories of a word (its origins, past uses, the changes which it has undergone, words related to it); or coming