Welcome to the latest installment of “Five Words From …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland starts and ends with the disappearance of 38-year-old mother-of-ten Jean McConville, taking the reader through The Troubles and the lives of several prominent Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) figures including Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams.
privation
“There were privations, to be sure, but nothing out of the ordinary for a working-class childhood in postwar Belfast.”
Interestingly, privation and deprivation have similar definitions, although privation tends to connote basic necessities of life.
quartermaster
“Francie’s father was a quartermaster, in charge of weapons and ammunition.”
At the start of The Troubles, the Provisional IRA was still using World War II-era weapons. This changed once they began to import firearms from the United States. Earlier quartermasters were also responsible for providing housing (or quarters) for soldiers.
inveigle
“In fighting an insurgency, Kitson realized, quality intelligence is essential, and one way to obtain that intelligence is to inveigle some members of the insurgency to switch sides.”
Inveigle (to win over by flattery) was borrowed from a French word aveigle, meaning ‘to blind’. The ‘a-‘ of aveigle was analyzed (according to the OED) as a prefix, turning into en- and then eventually in-. There’s also an obsolete word veigle which has a similar meaning.
strafe
“The gunmen had orders not just to kill the young pair who operated the laundry service, but to strafe the ceiling of the van with bullets, in order to kill the sapper inside.”
The word comes from German “strafe” meaning “to punish” like in the German World War I slogan, Gott strafe England which meant “God punish England.”
tout
“Anyone who violated the credo of silence could be branded a ‘tout,’ as informers were known. And touts got killed.”
In Northern Ireland, informers were referred to as touts and supergrasses. The term grass is more popular in the United Kingdom. The IRA had its own internal unit tasked with identifying and executing touts.