Irish Pennant

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Tom Pertell.

I’m calling you from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, Tom.

Hi there.

And I have a question about a term I heard some 60 or so years ago, and I’ve not seen it since.

And I wonder if you can help me.

The term is Irish pennant, as in flag.

And it was used when I was in the Marine Corps about 60 years ago.

If the drill instructor found a loose thread on your uniform where you had perhaps re-sewn a button or mended a tear, and you still had a loose thread on there, it was called an Irish pennant.

Oh, and this was a terrible sin. This was awful.

I’d never seen that term used anywhere.

And I wondered if you had some idea of where it came from.

So it’s Irish, I-R-I-S-H, pennant.

Yeah, as in Ireland.

Pennant, P-E-N-N-A-N-T, like a flag.

Yeah, like a flag.

Okay.

This belongs to a category of words you could call ethnofalisms, P-H-A-U-L-S-I-M.

These are derogatory terms that have to do with the characteristics of a certain type of people, a certain group, an ethnic group, or a racial group, or a religious group.

And there’s this whole category of these ethnophilisms that basically are about the Irish and about the Irish experience in the United States and have to do with a kind of slightly comical but slightly derogatory view of the world as if the Irish were something less than the people around them.

Is that right?

Yeah.

So there’s things like the Irish ambulance or the Irish baby buggy is a wheelbarrow.

Do you know this one?

No.

I have no idea.

An Irish screwdriver is a hammer or an Irish football is a potato.

-huh.

Or the Irish funnies or the Irish sports pages are the obituary columns of the newspaper.

Oh, my goodness.

I had no idea.

And I’m Irish.

Yeah.

Oh, you’re Irish.

I’m like three-fifths Irish myself or something like that.

But the thing is, so this is a whole period, certainly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, where the Irish were a newish incoming immigrant group.

And a lot of the reaction to the people who had been here for a while was to come up with these ways to characterize them and diminish them and be derogatory towards them.

And this was one of those ways.

Not to say that the Irish don’t do this to themselves because there is a long tradition of busting each other’s chops in Irish culture.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if these were and maybe are widely used in Irish communities.

Perhaps, yes.

But in the military group, we do find that the Irish pennant, meaning a hanging thread or a bit of cloth, a rope end that isn’t tied up properly, or even the hem of a woman’s slip, like sticking out below her skirt.

We do find Irish pennant used for all of these in a military context, kind of burst onto the scene in 1940s.

But we also find it in naval jargon in the 1840s.

So it had been around in the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy and among sailors and people at sea for 100 years before it ever showed up in World War II soldiers’ mouths, and it continues to be used to this day.

I’ll be darned.

This is most interesting.

This has just been an eye-opener for me.

Thanks so much.

For me, too, Tom.

Take care now.

Thanks a lot.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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