"Jew(ish) lightning"
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Mar 4 18:22:41 UTC 2011
On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:33 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> "as Irish as Paddy's pig"
By coincidence, I, too, am familiar with this phrase from literature.
I may have heard it on the radio, During The War. Or not.
Back in the day, there was a lot of "Irish" stuff around: the comic
strips Mickey Finn, Moon Mullins, Casey Ruggles, etc.; the radio
programs Casey, Crime Photographer; The Life of Riley, Dennis Day - or
Dea? - of The Jack Benny Show; Miss Lulu McConnell of It Pays To Be
Ignorant, Duffy's Tavern (though Duffy himself was never on the set),
etc.; songs such as Clancy Lowered The Boom, The Irish Washerwoman,
Christmas In Killarney (the ivy green / the holly green / the
prettiest picture / you've eve seen / it's Christmas in Killarney /
with all of the folks at home; what can I tell you? I like it. It's on
my iPod), Galway Bay, etc. There was another popular song whose name,
surprisingly, escapes me. It was about the participating clans in
something (a St. Paddy's Day parade?), written in such a way that the
clan-names rhymed; Slip Mahoney of the East-Side Kids/Bowery Boys,
etc., etc.
--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list