Throwing shapes: Frank McNally on the mysteries of the Hiberno-English ‘gimp'

Irish Times

08-05-2025

Reader and writer Michael Flanagan has appealed for my help with a word he 'used in a story' recently, only to be told that his intended meaning is now redundant and liable to be misunderstood.
The word was 'gimp'. And it's funny he should ask, because ever since hearing this term applied to myself a while back, I've been wondering what it means too.
A year or two ago, I fell into conversation with an affable
Corkman
who was married to a woman from Kingscourt, a town close to where I grew up (albeit on the other side of the peace wall with
Cavan
).
This had lent him certain insights into the people of my native
Carrickmacross
. So much so, apparently, that he would not have needed to be told where I was from. 'You have a real Carrick gimp on you,' he said.
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It was meant affectionately, I think (insofar as you can ever be certain with Cork people). But I had to look it up afterwards, just in case, and was not entirely reassured.
I found that in English dictionaries, where it's considered 'US and Canadian offensive slang', the primary meaning is 'a physically disabled person, especially one who is lame'.
Then I turned to Terry Dolan's Dictionary of Hiberno-English, which may be nearer the mark in the context intended by my Leeside friend.
There, a gimp is said to be a person's 'demeanour, bearing, appearance'. Illustrating which, Dolan cites a sample usage from Meath: 'You'd know by the gimp of him he was a guard.'
Michael Flanagan gives his own, highly detailed, understanding of the word, as follows: 'I always took it as describing a practised, assertive, loose-limbed walk – as cultivated by an Irish navvy in the London of the postwar era in order to enhance and reinforce his aura of assertive masculinity when walking on to a building site.'
And right enough, the building site bit aside, a loose-limbed walk projecting an aura of assertive masculinity was what I used to aim for as a teenager, when nervously approaching Kingscourt girls in the Granada Ballroom on Sunday nights.
Now, Michael has been told, the old meaning of gimp has been superseded by a 'modern sadomasochistic association': referring to a leather or rubber body suit, including mask.
You wouldn't want to have had that sort of gimp on you in the Granada Ballroom, although looking back, a mask might have improved my chances.
I'm still a little concerned about what the exactly the Cork friend meant, given how Dolan also notes that 'gimp' can carry the suggestion of 'overbearing behaviour'.
But I'm somewhat relieved to see in the archives that our current President has used the word at least once, with affectionate intent, in a funeral eulogy.
Back when he was a TD and recent Arts minister, Michael D Higgins paid tribute to the late actor Donal McCann as someone whose talent was 'a kind of truculent gimp aimed at excellence'. That sounds like a compliment, of sorts.
As for my Cork friend's implication there was a specific Carrickmacross gimp, this raises the possibility that, as with traditional fiddle-playing styles, there were local and regional variations.
Now that the meaning is threatened with extinction, it would be interesting to know if there was a distinct Galway gimp, for example, or a Mayo one. And if so, what were the defining characteristics. (On a separate note, the Galway Gimp sounds like the subject for a song, possibly by the Saw Doctors).
Speaking of natural history, yesterday's column about Flann O'Brien and his fake letters led another reader to the discovery of a story about Carl Linnaeus and a fake butterfly.
The link was the grammatical term 'eclipsis', which in Irish refers to the eclipse of one opening consonant by another. Hence the 'g' before the 'C' in Myles na gCopaleen.
But when looking that term up, Colum Farrelly from Derry chanced upon the saga of Papilio ecclipsis, a rare butterfly so named by Linnaeus in a 1763 book.
The butterfly had first been part of the collection of one William Charlton (1660 – 1702), until he gave it to his friend James Petiver (1665 – 1718), a London apothecary who had one of the world's biggest natural history collections.
Petiver said of the otherwise unknown insect that it 'exactly resembles our English Brimstone butterfly were it not for those black spots and apparent blue moons in the lower wings'. In honour of its original owner, it became known as the Charlton Brimstone.
The 'unique' specimen later devolved into the ownership of the British Museum, where it was eventually exposed as a hoax by a brilliant pupil of Linnaeus, Johann Christian Fabricius.
In a 1793 book, Fabricius revealed that the butterfly was a common Brimstone after all, and that spots and moons had just been painted on.
Some time after that, the specimen disappeared from the museum. The story goes that a keeper of the collection was so enraged by the fake, he stamped it to pieces.
Getting back to the eclipsed Myles na gCopaleen, he simplified his name in 1952 when metamorphosing into Myles na Gopaleen, possibly with an eye to a wider readership, but much to the regret of Irish Times subeditors.