Hiberno-English: it's a soft day

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Spending some time in Ireland, I hear people saying "It's a soft day" or "It's a soft day, thank God!".  Not knowing what that expression implies, I do a search and find that "A soft day is what the Irish call a very very damp fog or a mizzle, which is a cross between a mist and a drizzle." (source)  Mizzle is also the color of a shade of paint. (source)

"Soft day" is a phrase derived from Irish lá bog (lit.) ("overcast day; light drizzle/mist").

That reaction to a moist, overcast day tells you something about the Irish mindset and helps you understand Irish sentiment and humor.

Well, now, I like Irish "mizzle", and I am fond of English "drizzle", but I also found a rhyming word that they remind me of:

Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of the Dutch language pees, meaning 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand.

The word pizzle is also known, at least since 1523, especially in the combination "bull pizzle", to denote a flogging instrument made from a bull's penis.

In William Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part 1, the character Falstaff uses the term as an insult (Act 2, Scene IV):

'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish!

(Wikipedia)

I know plenty of dog owners who give bull pizzles to their dogs to chew on, and Chinese archeologists and athletes think that pizzle soup makes them virile (ugh!).  I also remember reading a Yuan Dynasty (1271-1367) literary work that made reference to a pizzle being employed as a mock flogging cane the same way Shakespeare did a couple of hundred years later, and the great translator James Irving Crump, Jr. (Columbia A.B. 1945, Yale Ph.D. 1950 under George Kennedy; his father was the editor of Boy's Life for over 25 years and wrote more than forty books, many in The Boy's Book Series), accurately translating that rare term in Chinese, which impressed me greatly.

Jeff Kellers, "Xiangkong Laoweng (The Codger Who Soars Through the Sky): James I. Crump, Jr. and Chinese Oral and Performing Literature (with a Bibliography of Professor Crump's Published Writing), CHINOPERL Papers, 25-26 (2005-2006), pp. 1-14. | Published online July 18.  July, 2013. The Life and Work of James I. Crump, Jr.

 

Selected readings

 



13 Comments

  1. Philip Taylor said,

    February 18, 2025 @ 11:28 am

    The version with which I am most familiar is "Ah, sure, 'tis a fine soft day …". "Soft" is more commonly used after "fine" than stand-alone, in my experience.

  2. mewo said,

    February 18, 2025 @ 12:48 pm

    The "soft morning, city!" section from Finnegans Wake is a beautiful example of this

  3. Jenny Chu said,

    February 18, 2025 @ 2:45 pm

    A "mizzle" sounds very similar to what we know in Vietnam as mưa phùn.

  4. Brett said,

    February 18, 2025 @ 5:38 pm

    I learned this sense of soft from the first episode of the Doctor Who serial "The Stones of Blood." The story involves a Celtic goddess and her stone circle, but it's the Doctor who uses the expression, not any of the locals.

  5. Victor Mair said,

    February 18, 2025 @ 7:49 pm

    @Jenny Chu

    And "mưa phùn" means "mizzle; drizzle".

  6. Roscoe said,

    February 19, 2025 @ 11:47 am

    From “Coming to America”: “Freeze, you diseased rhinoceros pizzle!”

  7. Victor Mair said,

    February 19, 2025 @ 1:50 pm

    From an Irish friend (Dubliner) who lives and works in London:

    =====

    I just got back from, wait for it, a SOFT week in Ireland….yes that's right, 7 days straight of drizzle and no sun….no wonder we drink so much….

    =====

  8. KevinM said,

    February 19, 2025 @ 6:40 pm

    In Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Arabella throws a pig's pizzle at Jude Fawley when they meet, rather setting the tone for the rest of the relationship.

  9. David Marjanović said,

    February 20, 2025 @ 9:01 am

    "I will yeah" meaning "I won't"…

    …thus proving once again that two positives make a negative!

  10. Tom Dawkes said,

    February 20, 2025 @ 4:44 pm

    @ Philip Taylor
    When I was learning elementary Irish, our teacher taught us "lá breá bog" [fine soft day] is used when it's raining and "lá breá geal" [fine bright day] when it's sunny.

  11. Philip Taylor said,

    February 21, 2025 @ 5:18 am

    Thank you Tom. So the "fine" prefix is baked into the Irish idiom, and frequently retained even when the speaker is using English — I did not know that. But it certainly accords with my experience.

  12. Ria said,

    February 23, 2025 @ 5:14 pm

    I've never heard mizzle used. Google says its a Scottish term.
    Soft is also used to describe tepid water.
    Which I find interesting because cold rain does feel hard on your skin.

  13. Philip Taylor said,

    February 24, 2025 @ 4:27 am

    "Mizzle" may indeed be a Scots term, Ria, but it is also widely used in Cornwall, which is just about as far from Scotland as it is possible to be in Great Britain !

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