When I was at school I learnt a bit about tiny particles. I expect you did too. There was the atom, the molecule, the proton, electron and neutron. And that was about it. Enough small stuff to fill a universe, we thought. But since those salad days of sulphurous odours, exploding test tubes and failing Chemistry O-level, we’ve learnt about even smaller particles: the quark, the neutrino, the Higgs boson…
And then there’s the smithereen.
We’ve actually known about smithereens for longer than we’ve known about atoms and molecules, probably because they are slightly larger and easier to see. The word was generally used to describe what became of you if you were hit by an exploding cannonball, as was often the case in the early 1800s. It later applied to any collection of tiny fragments, such as the bits of that gaudy vase that you were given as a present but never really liked, which skitter across the floor after you accidentally knock it over and smash it.
I say exploding cannonball, by the way, because not all cannonballs exploded. Some were solid, known as shot, and just made big holes in things. The exploding ones were known as shells, because the metal part was just a shell for the explosive stuff inside. Oh the wonders of human invention!
But where did the word ‘smithereen’ come from? The ‘smith’ part suggests it’s a very English word, possibly named after some poor, unfortunate cabin boy who met his maker at Trafalgar, but it’s not. The ‘een’ is the giveaway. It’s the Irish equivalent of the French ‘ette’, denoting a diminutive version of the main stem of the word, in this case ‘smiodar’ meaning fragment. Run together you get ‘smidirin’ (a small fragment) and then it’s a simple slur over a glass of whiskey to give you smithereen.
Irish has given us a number of our more colourful words, such as hooligan, galore and my personal favourite, kibosh. Contrary to popular belief, however, it doesn’t include shenanigans, despite the number of Irish pubs by that name across the world. Shenanigans first emerged in California, around Sacramento, and it’s been going on there ever since. But no-one knows how the word came into being?
It could be a corruption of some obscure Spanish word, or possibly even Chinese, given the amount of Spanish and Chinese being spoken in mid-19th century California. Or it could just be a nonsense word that somebody made up during a drunken fight over a gold mine. It is exactly the kind of word that drunk, punchy gold prospectors come out with when trying to come out with any other word in the English language.
What shenanigans and smithereens do have in common is that, like pants and trousers, they are nearly always used in the plural. You rarely hear mention of a smithereen. Unlike pants and trousers, though, you won’t find them in the menswear department of Marks & Spencer.
