The Name of the Game

The names of things can be highly misleading. E. Estyn Evans gives a nice example: a simple horse-drawn hayrake, now rarely seen, used to be considered characteristically Irish, and was popularly known as a ‘tumbling paddy’. The evidence suggests, however, that it was introduced from America in the mid-nineteenth century. But such examples should not deter us. Subjected to careful scrutiny, names can often tell us much about the things they describe, and should therefore be regarded by students of disciplines such as folk life and folklore, potentially at least, as an important key to their subjects.There is one snag here, though. Names are found in dictionaries and, as most dictionaries proceed alphabetically, different names for the same things will not generally be found side by side, with the result that the student will not be easily able to locate those names for the purposes of comparison. The need is not only for dictionaries, which are of course vital, but also for thesauruses, since these proceed not from word to concept, but in the opposite direction, thus listing under a given concept or keyword all the relevant names in alphabetic or other appropriate order

Archaeology · Common name · Folklore · Irish · Key (lock · Linguistics · Listing (finance · Proper noun · Scrutiny · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Socioeconomics of Resources and Conservation

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