What's The Crack With Craic?

 What's the Crack with 'Craic'?

Willie Drennan

 

It's good to do that we have some dedicated readers who spot the deliberate mistakes that we sometimes throw in to make sure people are paying attention. In Issue 8 some of you did notice that in one of my stories the word crack was spelled ‘craic’. This spelling of course has become normal among young journalists and older writers who would like to be seen as being trendy: ‘crack’ or ‘craic’ is generally understood to mean jovial conversation.

 It is a word of Lowland Scots, and probably Old English, origin and has been in common use in parts of Ulster since the 17th century: it was popularized in Belfast during the Industrial Revolution when hundreds of families moved there from its rural hinterland. At some stage in was introduced into the Irish Language where it was spelled ‘craic’ because the letter 'k' does not exist in that language, but prior to that it was often used by Ulster and Scottish writers/poets/journalists etc. and commonly spelled ‘crack’. Mind you, occasionally in Ulster-Scots it has been spelled ‘crak’ or ‘crek’. This was either because they wanted to reflect how it was pronounced, didn’t know how to spell it or just because they wanted to be thran and different.

Now, I'm not trying to challenge the legitimacy of this word being considered 'Irish': that's just the way languages work. New words are introduced to most languages on a regular basis and it wouldn't surprise me if some wee man, or wee woman, in Oxford will introduce 'craic' into the Oxford Dictionary sometime soon. They may have already done so but I don’t care: I will continue to use the spelling ‘crack' as commonly used in rural County Antrim when I was a wean. Everybody else can spell it whatever way they want. I really do not care that much.

[From Issue 9 of The Ulster Folk]