Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples (2024)

Regular reader Martin Aherne wonders if “Gaisce” and its sarcastic relatives “gaiscí” and “gawshkogue”, which we were discussing here on Thursday, might be related to the French-English “gasconade”, meaning “absurd boasting” or “vainglorious braggadocio”.

Gaconade descends from the people of Gascony, he points out, who by ancient repute were given to big talk.

According to Brewer’s Dictionary, a typical Gascon visiting Paris once was asked what he thought of the Louvre and responded that he liked it because it reminded him of “his father’s stables”.

The bragging was more notable, suggests Brewer, “when it is borne in mind that the Gascons were proverbially poor”. A related surname, Gascoigne, came to Ireland with the Normans, Martin reminds me, and went native as Gaskin or, in Irish, de Gascún. There is even a townland named after them: Gaskinstown, in Co Meath.

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I passed Gaskinstown as recently as last Tuesday night, while on the road to Slane, still slightly rattled by an incident farther back on the N2.

This used to be my route home to Monaghan, before the M1 eclipsed it in efficiency, and it could be notoriously slow back then, especially if you were stuck behind a lorry, which you always were.

But the stretch from Dublin to a now-bypassed Ashbourne is dual carriageway these days, and if anything a little fast for my liking.

I was proceeding along it at a sedate 100km/h the other night when a car overtook me at what must have been half that speed again. Moments later, a Porsche also went by in a blur.

How long had the N2 been an autobahn, I asked myself. And I was still wondering when, three minutes later, I came upon a crash scene.

There were two cars on their sides (not the ones that had passed me): the first in the hard shoulder to my left, the other in the middle of the road farther on, facing back the way it had come.

Seven or eight other drivers had pulled up to help or gawk. The rest of us weaved a path slowly through the debris that was scattered everywhere.

Miraculously, nobody seemed to be seriously injured. Even so, I continued northwards gingerly and, for old time’s sake, as if stuck behind a lorry.

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Whatever about gaiscí having French roots, the Hiberno-English “gasún” (with its several variant spellings) almost certainly does, although when pronounced as it is in my native Northeast, I always find this hard to believe.

At Sunday’s Monaghan-Louth football match, for example, it’s a foregone conclusion that some older supporters will shout approvingly “good gah-sun!” at younger players who impress.

The emphasis will be on the first syllable of “gah-sun”, which will also be severely elongated. There will be no trace of an “r” sound anywhere.

And for me, at least, it will as always be a source of wonder that this is essentially the same word as “garcon”, used (in cartoons and language tutorials anyway) to summon waiters in posh French restaurants.

Although he spelt the HE version “gorsoon”, the etymologist Patrick Weston Joyce seemed to accept its gallic origins only with some reluctance. “It is hard to avoid deriving this from French garcon,” he wrote in English as We Speak it in Ireland (1910).

As for another form of the word, “gossoon”, he thought that had an Irish root, (via “gas, a stem or stalk”). “But the termination oon or ún is suspicious in both cases,” Joyce concluded, “for it is not a genuine Irish suffix at all.”

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It was a writer named James J Gaskin who, as long ago as 1869, claimed that the elevated view of Dublin’s Killiney Bay was “unrivalled in its beauty, with only one exception (that of Naples), and singularly like it in all its features, except the absence of Vesuvius.”

Yet I found myself repeating this comparison only last Sunday, when suggesting to a French friend who wanted to see some of Dublin on foot that we take the Dart to Killiney and then climb the eponymous hill.

We started on the local beach, which she gratifyingly said reminded her of the one at Nice, if only because neither of them has any sand.

Then we ascended to Vico Road for the big “just like the Bay of Naples” view. But en route, the mother and father of all Irish summer downpours descended, forcing us to huddle for 20 minutes under a small tree and an equally inadequate umbrella.

So when we finally squelched our way to the main viewing point, I had to qualify Gaskin’s eulogy: “If you can imagine it with blue skies, and while you’re wearing dry clothes, it is nearly Neapolitan.”

After that, we abandoned plans to climb the local Vesuvius, and trekking down the rainswept hill to Dalkey, dried out over fish and chips and pints of Guinness in a pub.