Alanna wrote: I am a regular poster on a UK forum and debate is raging about this term there atm. Before I moved to the UK I never really heard this phrase for describing a tantrum so I suspect it originated in the UK. I was wondering what the opinion is on here? I suspect the origin of this term stems from the opinion that the Irish over in the UK had a history of fighting and being physical but I could be totally wrong. I can't find the origin of it anywhere, so does anyone here know where it comes from, or care?
KilbarrackBlows wrote: For some reason i get really pissed off when i hear an english person calling an irish guy a paddy or irish people paddy's i find it offensive. Ive talked to british troops and some british people online or ran across them on some other sites and they use it in a derogatory way so i do find it racist :mad:
Pighead wrote: Pighead would have thought that 'throwing a Maddy' would be a more fitting term to describe somebody who was losing it.
From the twelfth century, when Gerald of Wales described the Irish as "a filthy people, wallowing in vice," to the nineteenth century, when Thomas Carlyle called Ireland a "human swinery", and well into the next, the Irish have were viewed as an inferior race by the British. Declan Kiberd, in ‘Inventing Ireland – The Literature Of The Modern Nation’ argues that Ireland was pressed into service as a foil to set off English virtues. ‘Victorian imperialists attributed to the Irish all those emotions and impulses which a harsh mercantile code had led them to suppress in themselves. Thus, if John Bull was industrious and reliable, Paddy was held to be indolent and contrary;if the former was mature and rational, the latter must be unstable and emotional;if the English were adult and manly, the Irish must be childish and feminine.’ (Page 34) The English, then, projected onto the Irish all the feelings and behaviour that they couldn’t face in themselves and, argues Kiberd, Ireland became England’s subconscious. Traces of this persist to the present day – Leeds, where I now live, is one of the most violent cities in the UK, yet people here still refer to someone losing their temper as ‘Throwing a Paddy” (and, of course, people still continue to use the expression “to welsh on a deal”).
tbh wrote: I would imagine that it's lost it's meaning today - most English people probably just think of 'paddy' in this context as meaning a tantrum, with no connection to ireland
r3nu4l wrote: Like the OP, I had never heard this term until moving to the UK. In fact I was here over a year before I heard it. A girl at work last February said it (a month after I started my current job). She immediately looked at me and threw her hand over her mouth in shock at her faux pas and then apologised. The fact that everyone else who was there started to squirm and look red-faced tells me that the English know exactly what it means and use it in a derogatory manner in much the same way as they use 'the N-word' in private but not in public... Therefore I view it as racist.
ejmaztec wrote: Throwing a paddy is no worse than zip up yer mickey!
Fratton Fred wrote: I think you need to be a little bit less sensitive.
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