Welcome to Shamrock Craic

CÉAD MÍLE FÁILTE! A hundred thousand welcomes to the new blog of ShamrockGift.com. Here, our aim is to be your go-to resource for everything Irish, from gift guides for friends and family to ancient Irish history. We intend for this blog to be fun and informative in a way that leaves our readers feeling accomplished after reading a post or two.

For that reason, we’ve chosen to call the newly redesigned blog ShamrockCraic, with an emphasis on the craic, pronounced, “crack.” For those unfamiliar with the uniquely modern Irish word, it’s a symbiosis of fun, banter, good times, and some sense of social productivity. It’s a feeling, an experience; something to be had, and something that, if lacking, you may want to dip out before the event becomes too depressing.

While there’s no exact contemporary English translation of craic, the origin of craic is in fact English. It’s the odd loan word from English that has been transliterated into Irish spelling and wholly adopted in the vernacular of Ireland today.

President Barack Obama enjoys the craic at the Dubliner in Washington, DC with his Irish cousin, Henry Healy, center, and Ollie Hayes, a pub owner in Moneygall, Ireland, from where Obama's ancestors hail, on St. Patrick's Day 2012. (Pete Souza / Official White House Photo)

Here’s how the Cambridge Dictionary defines craic: “enjoyable time spent with other people, especially when the conversation is entertaining and funny.” As an example of usage, the dictionary gives, “The boys went driving round the town just for the craic.” It’s as much a state of mind as it is an experience, but, crucially, a good experience.

But this definition is a linguistic evolution from the original English “crack,” which was generally used to mean news, conversation, or gossip, as in “What’s the crack?” meaning, in contemporary American, roughly, “What’s up?” or, “What’s new?” but with a sly aim towards inquiring about information less newsworthy than the weather and more in line with, “Do you have any dirt on our friends who we’re about to meet up with?” But also signifying a sentiment akin to “I just want to gently make fun of my friends and need the most up to date information with which to do so.”

"Ceol & Craic" has become Irish shorthand for a classic night out in a traditional Irish pub. Translated, it means "Music and fun." (Traditional Craft / ShamrockGift.com)

The earliest instances of the English word crack date as far back as a Middle English term “crak,” meaning loud conversation or bragging talk, according to T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English. By the 17th century, the term had fallen out of favor in the south of England and had taken on new connotations in the north of the country as well as in Scotland. For the northerners, the meaning had shifted from braggadocio to a sense of gossip and social updates. In this sense, the word has always retained its connection to friendly news and banter, rather than nation-changing affairs.

Yet it wasn’t until the 19th century that the word crack became commonplace in the written language. Robert Burns used it in his dialect poems in the 1780s, and Robert Fergusson before him, yet these were outliers writing in a vernacular spoken language style rather than accepted “standard” English. Think of it as akin to the hard work southern American writers had to do in order to get publishers to print “ain’t.”

"The craic was mighty" is a way of conveying just how much of a good time one had in Ireland. (Traditional Craft / ShamrockGift.com)

By the mid 19th century however, crack had become more acceptable in literary language. One of the most famous instances of the Scottish crack can be found in the song “The Work o the Weavers,” which dates back to the first decades of the 1800s. The first line goes, “"We’re a’ met thegither here tae sit an tae crack, Wi oor glesses in oor hands.” (More or less, “We all meet together here to sit and to crack with our glasses in our hands.”) Here, however, crack is used as a verb, a usage that has not withstood the passage of time. Today, it is resolutely a noun.

An 1865 book detailing songs and ballads from Cumberland, a county in northwest England, refers to people “enjoying the crack.” During the later half of the 19th century, this noun form migrated from northern England and southern Scotland to the north of Ireland, and for the next hundred or so years, it was a specifically Ulster dialect word, though even into the 1950s, the word would still occasionally appear in quotation marks when published, indicating that it was vernacular, rather than accepted standard Ulster English.

The Dubliners, whose version of the classic 1960s song "The Craic Was Ninety on the Isle of Man" in 2006 helped popularize the "craic" spelling over "crack." (Jim McCann / Wikimedia Commons)

One of the beautiful things about language is how malleable it is. And by at least 1968, “crack” had migrated south of Ulster and become “craic” in the Irish language with a Gaelicized spelling. In English, the word was still spelled crack, but in Irish, as evidenced by the catchphrase of the Irish language show SBB ina Shuí, “Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn (We'll have music, chat and craic), the word had been totally borrowed by Irish.

It wasn’t until the 1990s however that the Irish language spelling was universally borrowed back into English. The 1990s, somewhat similar to the 1890s, saw a resurgence in “traditional” Irish culture. What this meant in practice was that the 1990s saw a resurgence in marketing a fabricated Ireland to the rest of the world. And part of this meant relying on Irish language spellings and Irish words in general. Hence, the acceptance of craic as the appropriate spelling of the word in English.

Guinness targeted the new spelling of "craic" with a throwback to their mid-20th century toucan mascot. (Guinness / TenonTours.com)

Guinness published advertisements in the style of their popular mid 20th century ads featuring the phrase, “What’s the Craic?” And The Dubliners re-released a popular 1960s song “The Crack was Ninety on the Isle of Man” in 2006 as “The Craic was Ninety on the Isle of Man.” The spelling change was part of a concerted effort to make the word more Irish, and it worked. Today, it’s as common as “Hey” on Dublin streets and has taken on a quintessentially Irish cultural cachet.

We’d be lying if we said we weren’t trying to tap into that essence of the word, but as much as we appreciate the arguments that some writers and thinkers have made that it’s a “fake Irish” word, we are more persuaded by the case for linguistic plasticity.

Crack has ceased to be commonplace in England and Scotland. Craic has become a way of describing a specific type of convivial Irish fun based on gentle ribbing, good times, and communal interest. And with that history in mind, we’re proud to call ourselves ShamrockCraic. We hope you find it here, and we will do our best to provide it.

ABOUT THE SITE

The blog is organized into seven categories, each with an aim to deliver specific types of Ireland-focused information: History, Heritage, Culture, Gift Guides, Travel, Brands, and News.

In History, you’ll find articles about Ireland’s past, based in fact and research. We will celebrate the Easter Rising as much as we will interrogate the reasons it failed. We will challenge the perception that the Great Hunger was a famine. We will give detailed explainers of how the English came to control the island. We will provide information on how pre-Christian Ireland transitioned into one of the most Catholic countries in Europe. And we will show how that history is still impacting contemporary Irish politics as much as it influences the way Irish Americans think about their ancestral home.

Our Heritage section will take its cues from History, but interact more with the way Ireland’s story has evolved over time. It’s no secret that 100 years ago the Irish didn’t have the same cultural authority or envy that they do today. We want to explore how clans, surnames, brands, and stories came to prevail over stereotypes. We will ask questions about what the notion of heritage means, and who gets to define it. We will endeavor to show the influence of writers and publicists in defining “Irish” culture, and we will examine how the idea of authenticity has evolved.

Irish Culture will take a more contemporary angle, focusing on literature, film and television, design, and language. While we may have an article in Heritage about the evolution of Aran sweaters’ design patterns, we will write about who is wearing Aran sweaters and why in our Culture category. We have as much interest in Maria Edgeworth’s legacy as we do in Sara Baume’s latest novel. We want to show the continuum of Ireland’s evolution. And we want to illustrate that contemporary Ireland has moved beyond the days of quaint cottages and repressed sex talks to embracing gay marriage and privileging secular schools. We also want to ask why and how, and hope this section will be as much exploratory as it is educational.

Our Gift Guides seek to provide you with our editorially objective opinions on the best merchandise ShamrockGift.com has to sell for any occasion. We will always inform you when a post is sponsored, and we will never shy away from slagging even our most profitable retailers. We want you to trust us, and we’re aware that trust can’t be built without honesty. We want to give advice that we’ve received in our own lives about appropriate and affordable gifts, and we want to give it to you.

There’s probably not much to say about our Travel section other than we encourage everyone to go to Ireland. We want you to have the best time you can have and we want to provide the most up-to-date information about those locations. We also recognize that some readers will be coming to the blog with less of an understanding of what the famous tourist spots are in Ireland, so we want to provide those explainers as much as we want to give everyone guides to the lesser-known wonders of the North and the Republic.

If you’re looking for information about any of the brands we sell, our Brands category should be all you need. Whether you’re interested in why Guinness has a toucan as a mascot or how to care for your Belleek china, we’re here for you.

In our News section, we’ll update you on everything related to ShamrockGift.com. Whether it’s special discounts or new products, you can check this category first for the latest updates.

We hope you enjoy the site as much as we do. And we hope you’ll have as much craic reading it as we have running it.