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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

• "Hiberno-English on the rise" (12/22/22) — Latvian prime minister (Krišjānis Kariņš) with an Irish accent and a linguistics PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, copious examples of Irish English, including the many different meanings of "grand" (e.g., "good", "bad", "Okay", etc., etc.), "I will yeah" meaning "I won't"…..
• "Irish 'would'" (3/21/17)
• "Irish 'maidhc'" (4/25/18)
• "'A Dub from Crumlin'" (11/2/20)
• "Intelligibility and the language / dialect problem" (10/11/14)
• "Irish without translation" (6/4/20)
• "Irish accents" (8/13/23)
• "Dialect or Topolect?" (7/1/10)
• "Dialect vs. accent (vs. language)" (11/30/18)
• "Dublin English" — Wikipedia
• Raymond Hickey, ‘Ireland as a linguistic area’, in James P. Mallory (ed.) Language in Ulster.
  Special issue of Ulster Folklife (45), (Holywood, Co. Down: Ulster Folk and
  Transport Museum, 1999, 36-53).

February 18, 2025 @ 11:24 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Topolects, Translation, Words words words

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