Paddywhacking and Mick-taking: Of Being on First-name Terms with the Irish Other
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paddy and Mick, the two quintessential Irish first names, have given rise to numerous words and expressions in the English language. As such, they are fine examples of antonomasia, but the extent and nature of their reuse set them apart within this stylistic figure. Indeed, Irish names have been targeted much more often than names denoting individuals from comparable minority cultures. Over many generations, in Britain and America notably, these two first names were liberally coined to designate and denigrate the hapless or strategic Other. Negative racial stereotyping, inspired principally by British colonial discourse and American republican idealism, constituted the main driving force, but anti-Irish prejudice was successfully exported to other English-speaking countries as well (Australia, Canada and New Zealand). All of the major Irish heterostereotypes have been inscribed into these lexicalised names. This paper traces the Othering of Paddy and Mick through their numerous linguistic modulations and examines the particular reasons for such consistent onomastic abuse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".