Patrick Kavanagh may not have used the word in his poetry, but Seamus Heaney did
Cato the Elder was an expert on matters agrarian and used the adjective 'glittus' when describing 'sticky soil'. Photograph: iStock
Luckily, my questioner also copied in David Stifter, professor of old Irish at Maynooth and a crack etymologist, who soon traced its usage to ancient Rome, where it was also an agricultural term, albeit rare. The word occurs in Heaney’s poem Fosterling, where he describes the watery ground of his birthplace: “I can’t remember never having known/The immanent hydraulics of a land/Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone/My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.”We’ll come back to “dailigone” shortly. But first, mention of Cato reminds me that where I grew up, as well as describing persons of senior or respected status in a community, the word “elder” was also the thing in which a cow kept her milk.
But the glamour event was a meeting of the elders: the All-Ireland dairy cow championship. And although the master of ceremonies had a rich vocabulary for describing the attributes required of competitors, including “beautiful mammary systems”, “elder” was his standard term.
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– Frank McNally on the ancient origins of a slippery wordPatrick Kavanagh may not have used the word in his poetry, but Seamus Heaney did
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