CC Podcast S01E03: What The Word Did To Old Women
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The Word
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So there's a word you've been hearing all your life about other women, and then one day it turns around and points at you. You say it about yourself first, and it comes out as a bit of a joke because a joke is the only way that it's allowed out of your mouth at all. And then you notice that nobody in the room bothered to argue with you or correct you, and you're quiet on it for the rest of the evening without being able to quite say why The word in this country, here in Ireland, is very often Cailleach, or whatever English we've put on it.
The old one, the witch, the hag, the crone. Today, I'm gonna take you through where that word has been because what happened to the word is what's happening to you when you use it for yourself. I'm Lora O'Brien, and I'm a native Irish educator and cultural [00:01:00] steward. I hold a master's degree in Irish history, ~and most of my work and life goes on inside the Irish language and the folk record, listening to~
The Schools Collection
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Most of my working life goes on inside the Irish language and the folk record, listening for what ordinary people did with a word in their own kitchens. I brought you into the schools collection in the last episode, and we're going straight back into it today 'cause it's a fantastic resource. Amazing.
Children wrote that collection down in the 1930s based on questions that they asked of the adults around them, ~their parents, their grandparents, their neighbors.~
Three Entries
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Their parents, their grandparents, their neighbors. So what you're getting there is particular words out of particular places taken from the people who actually use them. So there's an entry in volume 1048 that's a list rather than a story, and the child has written at the top of it that the following Irish words were used by English speakers in their ordinary conversation, and cailleach is on that list, and it's given in three ways: an old woman, the old stumps of a tree, [00:02:00] and a bundle of wrack or seaweed towed after a boat The rack there, the seaweed, that's heavy thankless work hauling it home behind you.
So this was baggage, basically. Now, stay with that heading for a second because of what it's telling you about the place. Irish had gone out of daily use here, and the English had come in over it, and this handful of words came through the change still working. A community will hold onto the words that it has a use for, so when Cailleach survives into English speech in a place where the Irish language did not, somebody in that locality was still finding a use for it every day
Then going further into the record, there's a second entry I found over in volume 0137B, and this one is about a bird. It reads, and I quote, "The Cailleach dubh is the sign of [00:03:00] bad weather. When you see her beside a stream or a lake with her wings open, it is a sign of bad weather." So the Cailleach dubh here is a black seabird, usually the cormorant.
So that entry is a working weather forecast rather than a story. It's bird lore, which is a very ancient form of Irish divination. I have a seagull going here in the background as I record this. The third entry that caught my eye is in volume 0967, and this is the one I want you to hear in full.
Cailleach is defined as a coward, generally used by schoolboys to one of their own number who declines a fight. You're only an auld cailleach. The word is not used for a woman now in this locality Let's just sit with that for a second. The word is not used for a woman now in this locality That last part is a remark [00:04:00] added onto the end of the record, and it's the line that I keep going back to in my own head.
Somewhere in that locality, the word had traveled far enough from an actual old woman that it could be written down as an insult between boys in a schoolyard with a note underneath saying it had gone out of use for women altogether. So what has to happen to a word, do you think, before a child can write that down and nobody finds it strange?
Now, that entry gives no reason for it going out of use for women, and I'm not gonna sit here and invent one for you. It could have been that the insults had got too hard to say to a woman's face, or that the women it named were gone, the actual Cailleachs within the community.
~The actual Cailleach within the community.~ Or something else again that nobody thought to write down. There were massive changes happening. Late 1800s, post-Great Famine in Ireland, the whole culture changed, [00:05:00] and this is the early 1930s. We'd had the revolution. We'd had the civil war. So
A lot had changed on the island. And What we have is the fact of it and the child's own flat delivery of that fact. That's it
~So let's sit back now and look at the shape~
The Shape of the Word
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So let's sit back now and look at the shape that it had taken by then. A word that once named a woman had turned into a charge one boy could lay against another in a yard. Absolute negative connotation there. And the charge was that he was afraid and wouldn't stand, wouldn't fight. And an insult like that only lands if being an old woman is the thing you'd least want to be called.
And in that schoolyard, that's how it landed Now that's three entries out of a very large folklore collection, so I won't stretch them past themselves or make them do any work that they're never supposed to be doing. But they are interesting because across those three, [00:06:00] the word has gathered around what's old and weathered, around a warning that bad weather is coming in, and around a boy who won't fight.
So set that against something that was said to me directly. Professor Dáithà Ó hÓgáin was one of my favorite lecturers, and he's dead now. He's passed away, unfortunately. But I had the good fortune to work alongside him back in my heritage management days. Now, he identified the Cailleach as a goddess specifically, and more particularly as a manifestation of the land goddess herself.
She was sovereignty and ancestry. So you've a land goddess at one end of that word and a schoolyard insult at the other, and it's the same word I can't give you the exact timeframe that it turned in, and anybody who hands you a date like that is guessing, to be honest. Both ends of it are sitting there in the record, and the second one is the end that reached you and me.[00:07:00]
It's the one that even... The second entry is even the one that has fallen out of use from the 1930s until now So I read that as a fall from wisdom to worthlessness. A sign of patriarchy taking over more and more. Taking more and more of a woman's power, and an old woman's power as things progressed towards capitalism and the absolute mess that we're in currently.
And I'll own that reading as mine rather than dressing it up as anybody else's finding or anything that I found in the record itself specifically. But I think it's clear. It's clear to me anyway. The Cailleach that I meet in the older material carries age and authority and knowledge and wisdom that was hard to come by.
It was hard fought for. It was hard won for that woman The [00:08:00] Cailleach
for that woman. And the woman the word ends up naming in that schoolyard carries none of that. So the knowledge went out of the word somewhere along the road
You picked up that word in a house somewhere, maybe from an adult, long before you were old enough to weigh it, to understand it. And what came to you maybe was the schoolyard meaning rather than the old one. And in English, the connotation that an old woman was weak, couldn't fight, couldn't stand up, couldn't do anything, was useless And then your own body started changing, and whenever that was for you, or maybe it's coming yet, there's a word already waiting for what you thought you'd become Cailleach, with all its negative connotations, a crone, a hag
Now look at what that word says about the things that it lands on. A stump is what's left after the tree is gone The wrack of seaweed is what you drag home and then have to deal [00:09:00] with, and the bird is a sign that something is coming, probably not something good. Every one of those sits at the far edge of its usefulness, and when the word lands on a woman, it says the same about her
So that could have been what you're saying about yourself when you're standing in the kitchen or making a joke at a party. And it's why nobody in the room argued with you because that's how society sees us, old, useless
Old and useless They all learned the same word from the same adults. They learned the same connotations, whether they used the word Cailleach or not. The hag, the crone, the old woman. They all came to mean the same thing
And you'll hear the shape of that same word in a waiting room when your symptoms get put down to your age. You'll hear it in a meeting when whoever interrupts you doesn't even notice they've done it. They just talk over you But the saying of it out loud is the part that does [00:10:00] the damage. ~A word you only think stays~ a mood
A word you only think stays a mood or a vibe, and a mood will shift on you of its own accord. A word you say out loud in a kitchen goes into the room and into whoever is standing there with you, and it comes back to you from them the next time. It's reflected. And that's how a word stays alive in a house long after anybody in it has a reason for it
But here's how I understand these years, and it is how I understand them rather than something I can prove to you, but I think you might find it relatable. These years that we're in, that we're called Cailleach or whatever version, an old woman, menopausal, a crone, a hag
These years are a threshold into older age, and what they ask of you is to take everything that you've actually lived and turn it into a strength that you can use. Now, that means taking the whole of it [00:11:00] as it was, with no gloss put over it, dismissing the connotations that it carries, 'cause they're not relevant to you The word you were handed does the opposite work, so know which of the two you're running on before you make the next set of decisions about your life.
That third entry is somebody noticing a word. A child sat down and looked at Cailleach long enough to write out where it had got to and who it was being thrown at, ~and to add a note about~ it, and to add a note about who it had stopped being thrown at. Nobody's ever done that in your own home, so the word goes on getting used every day about the one woman who can't walk away from it
The Counting Exercise
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Now, this week's work is a count for you to do, and it takes just a single evening. I want you to set out two saucers or two cups or any two small dishes side by side on the counter or on a table that you go past often, and put a fistful of buttons or coins into the one on the left, whatever's [00:12:00] nearest to hand, matches, anything.
And from the time you start until the time you go to bed, move one button across to the right-hand dish every time you say something about your own age or your own body, or you think it even. Move one item from one cup to the other, whether you said it out loud to somebody else or only in your own head.
The teasing counts, the jokes count, the throwaway counts, the ones you'd stand over as being nothing but plain truth count as well. Don't stop yourself saying them. Stopping yourself is a different job for a different week, and it would ruin the count. We're just looking for an honest picture of where you are right now with the word Cailleach, with everything that it represents, with the concept of yourself as an old woman
Now going up to bed that night then, tip the right-hand dish into your two hands and hold what's in it. [00:13:00] Feel the weight of it, count them, put them away. ~So run that for one day or one evening, and you'll be performing~
So run that for one day or one evening. A whole evening might be more than this week has room for, so take the count from the dinner to the news instead and stop there. Whatever you have time for. A short count taken properly beats a long one that you gave up on by nine o'clock. And I'm sending you after a count rather than after a feeling because a feeling arrives already argued with, and by the time you've named a feeling, you've decided what it says about your character, where a dish of buttons has no opinion about you whatsoever.
The number is the finding, and there's nothing else that you need to do with it this week And you're counting your own words and nobody else's. So this is not a tally to keep on your sister or your husband or the woman at work who says harder things about herself than you'd ever say about her
Closing
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So the work for you this week is to notice which meaning of that word you've been handing yourself. Which concept of the old woman [00:14:00] are you living with? And to get one clear evening's count of how often you hand it to yourself. You can't argue a word out of a language, and you weren't the one who put it in there Now, if you want something to steady yourself with while you do it, as ever, the grounding audio and the PDF that goes with it are free at cailleach.community/past, P-A-S-T.
And it's what I give women who come to me with that waking anxiety and that inherited heaviness. It's free, and it's yours, and I'll see you in the next episode. Slán.
