My husband wanted to use the lavatory in London recently, as husbands begin to, and, since all the public conveniences have inconveniently been closed, he popped into the Strutton Arms. I was delighted to find that it had changed its name from Finnegan’s Wake. My objection was not the apostrophe, which, though absent in the name of the book is present in the name of the song. Nor did I want it to revert to the Grafton Arms, a name deriving I think from its former landlord, Jimmy Grafton, in whose back bar the Goon Show was invented. Before that it was called the King’s Arms. It wasn’t the name as much as the fake Irishry that was unwelcome during the Finnegan’s Wake years. I suspect it had ‘Fir’ and ‘Mna’ on the lavatory doors.
Much like those stage-Irish years has been the history of the word craic. Anyone would think that it had always been familiar — perhaps to Joyce himself. Yet the earliest known example of its use in English is from 1972, when someone in the Irish Independent wrote that ‘traditional musicians, singers and dancers gathered for the “craic”.’ It appears to have been borrowed by Irish English from Scottish English in the middle of the 20th century, by way of Ulster. Even in Irish Irish it was not popular until used in a catchphrase on a television programme called SBB ina Shuí between 1976 and 1983. SBB, of course, stands for the popular presenter Seán Bán Breathnach, and the catchphrase went ‘beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn’ — we shall have music, chat and crack.
But like the Finnegan’s Wake, Strutton Ground, the word was English under its Irish shopfitting.
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