It means son of, the apostrophe is wrong, and the distinction between Irish and Scottish is entirely imaginary
Mc and Sons in Borough holds a 4.6 from thirteen hundred and ninety-five people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the name is a joke about a word that already means son.
Mac
It is Gaelic. It means son.
MacDonald is the son of Donald. MacLeod is the son of Leod.
So Mc and Sons means, roughly, Son and Sons, which is either very stupid or extremely good, and the Prat has decided it is the second.
Mc versus Mac
Which everybody believes is Irish versus Scottish.
It is not.
There is no linguistic distinction whatsoever. Mc is simply an abbreviation of Mac – the way St is an abbreviation of Saint – and it was used interchangeably, by both Irish and Scottish families, for centuries.
The spelling of a surname was not fixed. It was whatever the clerk wrote down.
And a very large proportion of Irish and Scottish surnames were standardised by English-speaking officials – in parish registers, in army rolls, in ship manifests, at Ellis Island – who wrote what they heard and moved on.
So a family’s spelling is frequently a record of one clerk’s handwriting on one afternoon.
And O’ is different
O’ is Irish, and it does not mean son.
It means grandson, or more loosely descendant – from ua – and it indicates descent from a named ancestor rather than a father.
Which is why O’Neill means of the line of Niall, going back centuries, rather than the son of a man called Neil.
And the apostrophe in it is not a possessive. It is not standing in for anything. It is an English typographical guess at a Gaelic sound, and it has stuck.
The Irish pub
Which we have written about in four districts and which was, everywhere it appeared, infrastructure.
The labour exchange – men stood outside on a Monday morning and were picked for the week.
The bank – the landlord cashed cheques, held money, and lent it, because a man with no address could not open an account.
The post office. The address you gave when you did not have one.
And the place where you found out somebody had died at home, and where the collection was taken so the body could be sent back.
Verdict
Excellent pub, cheap, strong number.
Go, and pronounce it however you like. So did everybody else.
The apostrophe
Which is in the name and which is doing nothing.
Mc’s is a possessive of an abbreviation of a word meaning son – so the name reads, strictly, as Son’s and Sons, which has now folded in on itself twice.
The Prat’s grammatical desk has decided to enjoy this rather than complain about it.
Because an apostrophe in a pub name is the eighth typo we have logged in eight postcodes, and this is the first one that is funnier for being wrong.
Why the spellings scattered
Because the people writing them down did not speak the language.
Gaelic was recorded, for centuries, by English-speaking clerks – in parish registers, army rolls, workhouse books and ship manifests – and they wrote what they thought they heard.
The same family, in the same parish, appears across three documents under three spellings.
And whichever version happened to be on the paper when the family emigrated, or enlisted, or was buried, is the one their descendants have now.
A surname is not a record of a family. It is a record of a clerk.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
