That word is "shillelagh." It is not pronounced phonetically as I first thought when I tried to read it out loud (my random guess was "SHILLY-lah") but the correct pronunciation is "shi-LAY-lee." My Celtic friends would probably laugh at my ignorance of the shillelagh, the club or walking stick often associated with Ireland and Irish folklore. I had never seen it in literature before. The word appears on page 10 of Blood Meridian, in the first of countless violent encounters in the novel. The young protagonist known as "the kid" has just bumped into an unfriendly stranger outside an outhouse in the rain, where there is only room for one person to cross the wooden boards over the wet street. Both refuse to yield for the other to pass, and so a deadly fight begins. Because that's the only logical way to solve any problems in the Old West.
"But someone else was coming down the lot, great steady sucking sounds like a cow. He was carrying a huge shillelagh. He reached the kid first and when he swung with the club the kid went face down in the mud. He'd have died if someone hadn't turned him over."
Aside: Isn't it crazy how death in the West always seemed like just a minor misunderstanding away? Or, as Mick Jagger would have said... "just a shout away." Or, as Seth McFarlane would have put it, there are "a million ways to die in the West." However you want to phrase it, McCarthy does a wonderful job bringing the constant dangers of the newly-settled West to life in his story.
But back to today's word: "shillelagh." Where does the word itself come from? Originally, it comes from sail éille [ˈsalʲ ˈeːl̠ʲə], a cudgel with a strap. As with many Irish words, like the names "Sean," or "Siobhan," the "s" sound in sail éille is pronounced as a "sh" sound.
Oxford's dictionary traces the word's origin to County Wicklow in Ireland, from the forest or wood located in the barony of Shillelagh, renowned for its oak trees, which gives the stick its name. Originally, in the 1600s, the word "shillelagh" was merely the term for the wood used to make cudgels or clubs. It later became associated with the sticks themselves - specifically a heavy walking stick with a large knob at the top. The sticks were typically made of hard blackthorn wood, or else oak. Wood from the root was especially prized because it was less prone to cracking. The wood would be smeared with lard or butter and stuck up a chimney to be cured, giving it a shiny, black appearance. Many shillelaghs had a strap at the top to go around the user's wrist. In popular culture, leprechauns are often pictured holding such knotted sticks. Here's a picture of some different kinds of shillelaghs.
And hell, because it's St. Patrick's Day, here's a picture of a leprechaun with a cutesy shillelagh.
However, shillelaghs were anything but cute. In fact, they were all business. According to Wikipedia, the heavy top knot could be hollowed out and filled with lead to make it heavier and more formidable as a fighting weapon. In the early 1700s, shillelaghs were used as dueling weapons to settle gentlemen's disputes, much in the way pistols were used in colonial America. More on their origins, if you're interested, here. According to experts and researchers, shillelagh-fighting evolved out of the use of shorter and shorter spears and wattles, and then eventually just blunt walking sticks, shorter clubs and cudgels. In fact, there's a form of Irish martial arts surviving to the present day called Bataireacht, which studies the use of the shillelagh closely. Use of the shillelagh as a gentleman's weapon eventually fell out of favor in Ireland after its use became widespread by mobs in Irish faction fights, along with other assorted heavy farm equipment. And of course, guns eventually became common, eliminating the practice of shillelagh fighting. But the study of the shillelagh as a weapon lives on among people with strong interests in Irish heritage and western martial arts.
Today, the shillelagh is recognized mainly as a symbol of Irishness, especially in sports and folklore. The Boston Celtics have a logo with a leprechaun leaning on his shillelagh. Also, the famous Jeweled Shillelagh is the trophy for the winner of the college football rivalry game between the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the USC Trojans.
So there you have it - another word we can add to our arsenal, thanks to Blood Meridian. Since reading the novel, I've tested the word on friends, to see if it was familiar to them. To my disappointment, more people seemed to know what a shillelagh was than I had expected. Oh well... at least it's one more entry done.
Despite lacking a drop of Irish blood myself, I want to wish all of you readers a happy and blessed St. Patrick's Day. I hope you enjoyed learning a new word with me through this post, and feel free to check out my other posts if you liked this one. Until next time!
