weep Irish
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From the extravagant displays of emotion associated with professional mourners at traditional Irish funerals.
Verb[edit]
weep Irish (third-person singular simple present weeps Irish, present participle weeping Irish, simple past and past participle wept Irish)
- (idiomatic, dated) To cry insincerely or in an exaggerated manner.
- 1843, Nathanael Burton, History of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, near Dublin:
- I have here omitted the pathetic description of Billy Flannagan, touching the doleful parting of Cathleen with her people, "who wept Irish," hullaghlued, ahahoned, with all the moving circumstances of her farewell, and the seeing her home.
- 1905, Bede Camm, Lives of the English Martyrs (Vol. 2):
- All this while, above in chambers looking out, we saw the long-bearded ministers of Geneva who laughed at us; but if we might have had our wills we would have made them to have wept Irish.
- 2007, Mary Kelly Black, Lovely, Lonely Life: a Woman's Village Journal (Vol. 1):
- She never confesed to me this seed of my disorder, but "wept Irish" to others, how I had shed tears at birth before my first sound.