An Irish bull is a ludicrous, incongruent or logically absurd statement, generally unrecognized as such by its author.It is considered an inherently offensive and racist term by Irish people. "Irish bull" originated in this use because such expressions often fall between two different statements, as between the horns of a bull. The Irish were supposedly peculiarly prone to such expressions due to their volubility, their taste for colourful metaphors, and their ignorance (or conversely excessive command) of the English language. Extensive use of Irish Bulls are made of by American Jewish humourists, from the period when large numbers of recent Jewish immigrants from Germany or Eastern Europe were present in American cities, which suggests that a similar effect produced the term "Irish Bull", which is partly contemptuous and partly homage. The "Irish Bull" is to the sense of a statement what the dangling participle is to the syntax. A jarring or amusing absurdity is created by hastiness or lack of attention to speech or writing. Although, strictly speaking, Irish bulls are so structured grammatically as to be logically meaningless, their actual effect upon listeners is usually to give vivid illustrations to obvious truths. Hence, as the Rev. Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, famously observed, "an Irish Bull is always pregnant", i.e. with truthful meaning.
The "father" of the Irish bull is often said to be Sir Boyle Roche[1], who once asked ""Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?"[2]. Roche may have been Sheridan's model for Mrs Malaprop.[3] Samuel Goldwyn was a famous American mis-speaker, as was Yogi Berra (see Examples below). The Irish Bull can be a potent form of self-conscious equivocation and satire in the hands of a wit's sharp tongue. As such, it is associated particularly with new or marginalized populations, such as the Irish in Britain in the Nineteenth Century, or the Jews and Germans in America in the Early Twentieth Century.
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Examples
- "If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive."
- Samuel Goldwyn, movie producer (1882-1974)
- "Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours."
- Yogi Berra, baseball player (1925- )
- "Back to back, they faced each other"
- Anonymous
- "He'd be turning in his grave if he were alive today"
- Anonymous
Footnotes
- ^ Falkiner, C. Litton (1902). "Sir Boyle Roche", Studies in Irish history and biography, Mainly of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., pp.228-240.
- ^ Geoghegan, Patrick M. (1999). "The union passes", The Irish Act of Union. New York: St. Martin's Press, 110.
- ^ Maye, Bryan. "An Irishman's Diary", The Irish Times, 2000-02-14, p. 17. Retrieved on 2006-06-19.
Other references
- Grierson, Philip (1938). Irish bulls.
