Miss Pym Discomposes

Q: I’m rereading Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes and came across something that has always puzzled me. Teresa suggests to Miss Pym that they get coffee at a teashop called The Teapot. Miss Pym replies, “A little Hibernian, surely?” Can you enlighten me as to what Miss Pym means? A: We think Josephine Tey is using “Hibernian” here to mean “Irish,” which has had the colloquial sense of illogical or paradoxical for several centuries. In Miss Pym Disposes, the paradox is going for coffee at a teashop. The oldest of these terms is the adjective “Irish,” which was spelled yriscan (roughly UR-iss-kahn) when it appeared in Old English and referred to a native of Ireland. The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a passage in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 1055: “Hig gegaderadan ða mycle fyrde mid ðam yriscan mannan & mid Walkynne” (“They gathered then a great army with the Irish men and with the Welsh men”). The OED says a “somewhat offensive” colloquial sense of…