Do you have a cracking st

“You miss the crack, boys!”

That could mean a lot of things, depending on the context. But in this case, it is called by a boisterous youth called Doalty in a small town in Donegal, northwest of Ireland, in 1833. Doalty is a character in the 1980s game. Translations, by Brian Friel. And what he says is something you hear right outside of an Irish pub today, but, true to the game’s title, he’s actually speaking Irish – it’s just translated to English for the audience.

So what does this word mean knock think here? What would he have said in Irish? Doalty does not speak of a gap on a surface (the Irish are for it rings), also not over a loud, loud noise (pléascadh), and certainly not about any form of cocaine. He’s talking about craicwhich you will often see in Irish English as knock. That – as the Americans most likely around St. Learning Patrick’s Day, March 17th – is the emblematic Irish kind of delight you get in a pub, music, abuse and lively wisdom talk.

In its strictest sense, the word refers to the recent events and gossip. When you say “What is the crack?” it means “What’s the last?” And it may have been “last time” that Friel’s Doality was named. He’s not talking about one céilí (an evening of dancing), and also not all that involved the shooting of Pints. There is abuse, yes, but not joy: the local English Army detachment is missing its deputy; it goes to a tear and causes much chaos to find him; and residents respond to their turn. Doalty’s description of it is riotous, but in reality it is a very serious scene.

And there is a British conqueror who has inadvertently slipped in, there and all the space with them, not just from the place, but from the time, and in the Irish costume on it.

Oh, I’m not talking about a character in the game. I’m talking about the word knock yourself.

The popularity of the word knock and Ireland – and its Irish spelling craic – you might very reasonably think it’s a great old Irish word, and that Doalty certainly “Tá an craic in easnamh oraibh!” But he would not. You will not even find the word craic and dictionaries of Irish from the 1970s (go see if you want; I already have it).

It is not that no one in Ireland has used that word knock before then. Bernard Share Slanguage: A Dictionary of Irish Slang records a 1925 instance of it called “Chat” from Louise McKay’s book Morne Folk: “Then she axed me to sit down, so that we’d cracked long enough over one thing and another.” But McKay’s Morne Folk had something in common with almost every Irish user of the word before 1970: They were in Ulster – the northeastern corner of Ireland, now Northern Ireland, part of Britain.

There is a stronger British, and especially Scottish, influence in that part of Ireland. And that’s where they’re knock. It is used in Scots and Northern English, where the expression “What’s the Crack?” also means “What’s last?” It’s around those parts for a fair amount of time; Walter Scott used knock in the Waverly (1814) to mean “boasts”, and when Robert Burns wrote “They’re a ‘in a famous tune for crack that day” in 1786 and “The Holy Fair” in 1786, he meant gossip and chat.

So where did ze get it from? Could it not come from Gaelic? It could not and it did not. It came from the English knock, which means fluent chat, conversation, gossip – and talk, taunts, and smart discussion. It’s the same knock that you see in weisecrack. And, in the beginning, it’s you knock that means “today, sharp noises”, as in what a whip does, or the sound a bar stool makes as it chews in two.

Sometime after it came from Scotland and England to Ulster, knock made its way to the rest of Ireland, most likely in the late 1960s, and then it was incorporated into the Irish language itself. The Irish do not use the letter K (which is also an English conqueror), but it uses quiet vowels a lot to indicate things about the consonants (things that are far too difficult for English speakers to explain here). So that was obviously Irish spelling craic.

When Irish radio personality Seán Bán Breathnach hosted a popular Irish-language radio show on the RTÉ network from 1976 to 1982, his tagline was “Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn” (“We’ll Music, Chat, and Crack” – pronounced sort of like ” Bay k’yol, Conch oggus crack a-went, “but not exactly). So it was a current term at the time that Brian Friel wrote Translations.

But the spelling, even then, was predominant knock in the English style. In a 2013 article in The Irish TimesDonald Clarke clearly remembers the superiority of the Irish craic Writing came on the heels of Ireland’s successful run at the 1990 World Cup – and the worldwide blow Riverdance. And now, he agrees, there is “the disturbing implication that it has always been written that way.”

Well, what can we say? It was naturalized – just like Friel’s missing lieutenant. Translations focuses on the translation or adaptation of Irish place names into English: Machaire Ban on Whiteplains, Cnoc na Rí on Kings Head, Druim Dubh on Dromduff, and the setting of the game, Baile Beag (which really just means “small town”) ), to Ballybeg. But the English deputy who writes these translations falls in love with an Irish girl, begins to learn Irish and slips away to Ireland.

And so it goes with craic: It came from England, but it has remained, and it now belongs to Ireland. And was it not thought? Sure, that’s a great story – as the Doalty says, “You’ve never seen such a crack in your life.”