One day I was speaking to the jarvey who was driving us about in the jaunting car, of a neighbor I had met, who had spent some years in America. He had returned to his native place with a “tidy purseful” of money, and was looking around for some business in which to invest his little capital.
“He seems to think very well of himself,” I suggested.
“He acts as if he came over with Cromwell a thousand years ago, and he looks down on thim of us who was kings of all the counthry, even before the mountains was made.”
An American tourist said to his driver: “Why do you speak to your horse in English, when you talk Celtic to your friends on the road?”
“Sure, an’ isn’t the English good enough for a beast?” was the reply.
The term “himself” is used to describe the boss, the head of a family, the chief man in an association, the commander of a ship, or the colonel of a regiment. It is applied in the same way as the term “old man” that we are accustomed to in the United States. When a subaltern in the army speaks of “himself,” you may understand that he means the colonel of the regiment. When an employee of a railway company alludes to “himself,” it is the general manager. And when a sailor uses that term he means the captain of the ship. Wives use it to describe their husbands; children refer to their fathers in that manner and workmen to their superintendent or the boss of the gang:
“Did himself give yez the order?”
“I will not take any directions except from himself.”
“You’ll have to wait till himself comes in,” said a young boy behind the counter in a Dublin shop.
“We’re waiting for himself to come home to dinner,” was the remark of a good wife, when I inquired for her husband.