21 May Happy Birthday to us

Contrarian turned one year old this week, and our pal Lindsay Brown took the occasion to upbraid us, with ever so uncharacteristic gentleness, on our use of the word begrudgery:

Your blog is not only wonderful, but essential. Yet I have the temerity to opine that no journalist worth his own block of salt should make up words. Especially a word that resembles the name of a caged bird far more than what their careless author intended to convey.

Honey, there ain’t no such word as begrudgery. And you should get a hold on your temerity and your opining and make use of the colourful and expressive English language instead of allowing readers to believe your faux Anglais. And no, sorry, “but making up words is fun!” is not allowed as a defence.

OK, first of all, I did not make up the word, but obviously someone did. While Ms. Brown is correct that it does not appear in standard dictionaries, a Google search turns up 45,200 instances of its use.

I first saw the word attributed to the Irish real estate tycoon Sean Dunne, in a New York Times article from January of last year.

“Jealousy and begrudgery are still alive and well in Ireland, and whoever eradicates them should be prime minister for life,” he says as he tucks into a heaping plate of gravy-drenched turkey and mashed potatoes in the restaurant of one of the two hotels he owns — and is hoping to raze. “It’s part of the Irish psyche and it is the result of 800 years of being controlled by other people, of watching everything the master or landlord is doing.

Consistent with Mr. Dunne’s claim, most of the begrudgeries Google unearthed were Irish in origin. The earliest I could find were (1) an August 2003 book review of, Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age by Rosemary Mahoney (which put the word in quotes):

Ms. Mahoney, who received her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and now lives in Baltimore, brings her peculiar Irish/American sensibility to bear on the discrepancies she sees between the picturesque little villages and the rampant unemployment, alcoholism, “begrudgery” and sense of betrayal that infect Ireland and the Irish.

and (2) a comment by Sen. Willie Farrell during an October 2003 debate in Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish Parliament:

We are good at begrudgery and blaming someone, whether they are responsible or not. Senator Reynolds mentioned the media and they are at their best when they engage in those areas of activity.

Had 45,200 people not invented begrudgery before me, I’d be proud to have done so. It’s a word we need, in Nova Scotia almost as much as Ireland.