A.Word.A.Day -- donnybrook

A.Word.A.Day

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Jun 18, 2007

This week's theme
Toponyms coined after places in Ireland

This week's words
donnybrook
limerick
blarney
shillelagh
carrageen

Previous week’s theme
Archaic words

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

On June 16, James Joyce aficionados the world over celebrated Bloomsday. The day is named after advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, protagonist of Joyce's novel Ulysses. The entirety of this 700+ page book recounts one ordinary day, June 16, 1904, as various characters go about their ways in Dublin.

In those 24 hours Bloom traversed the streets of Dublin. In his honor we'll spend the next five days visiting places in Ireland. We'll see words that have their origin in towns, hamlets, and suburbs in Eire (the Irish name of Ireland).

donnybrook

(DON-ee-brook)

noun: A brawl, a free-for-all.

[After Donnybrook, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, where an annual fair was held until 1855. This Donnybrook Fair was known for its alcohol-fueled brawls.]

"For a split second, you had to wonder if a donnybrook were about to break loose."
Phillip M. Bowman; Lexington Reaction Was As Ugly As It Was Inappropriate; The Post and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina); May 19, 2007.

X-Bonus

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him. -Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

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