Lexicographer was described by profiler as “in some ways, as mad as a March hare”
Patrick Pearse: Dinneen had been a long-running critic of Pearse, considering him pretentious, mockingly referring to him as “Pee Haitch”, and looking down on his poor IrishDiary, Feb 19th), Fr Patrick Dinneen – he of what the Taoiseach called the “gold standard” Irish-English dictionary – was mercilessly lampooned for many years by this newspaper’s Myles na gCopaleen, aka Flann O’Brien. But this was only the second half of a rare literary double.
He was the first reader to arrive every day, on the dot of 10am. He always sat at the same desk , having tried all the others and decided it was the least draughty. Then he reserved the seat by leaving his tall hat on it and, while “chewing a bit of apple, or carrot, or dulse”, made the first of many visits to the counter.
Those quotations, and the estimated coordinates of his favoured desk, are from a 1959 profile in this newspaper by Risteárd Ó Glaisne, who went on to venture the opinion that Dinneen was “in some ways, as mad as a March hare”. Like Myles, whose work he didn’t live to read, Dinneen was also very fond of wordplay, although if there had been a Geneva Convention on torturing puns, he would have been arrested a few times. Myles was of course a master of the genre. In one of his classics, he called himself a “spoiled Proust”. And in that joke too, he and the dictionary man had something in common.
His departure from the Jesuits coincided with a conversion to the cause of Irish. Although born to native speakers in Kerry, he had never shown much interest in the language before then. Now he immersed himself.
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