MINE TINKET  A brief history.  (Ira Maine bio here)

Academics have it that our commonly used  ‘Good on you!’ is almost certainly derived from the traditional Irish way of giving thanks which was invariably accompanied by a blessing. In fact, in common Irish parlance the blessing alone served as a more than adequate response without the need for  an additional ‘thank you’.

As an example, (and I quote the late Prof. O’Higgins here) were I to do a good deed or kindness to a native of that country, almost without exception the grateful response would be;

‘Ah, the blessings of God on you!’

Henning-Blore has it, and is supported in this by both Princeton’s Adam Sharkey and Joyce Barnacle of Dublin’s Trinity College that this blessing transferred to Australia and, in a short time lost God, assumed a leaner demeanour and became our instantly recognisable ‘Good on you’.

Professor Tom Carmody-Stack, in his admittedly abstruse contribution to the ‘Mine Tinkit’ debate,  believes that the same sort of connection exists, astonishingly between Chaucer, Piers Plowman and Romeo and Juliet!.

Here are one or two examples;

In Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ the servant Mayne is sent off in search of the hilariously hopeless Troilus.

Pandarus cries out to the simpleton Mayne;

What of Troilus, simpleton?. ‘

‘Methinks… mythinks…’

‘Ho, fool, what dost thou think?’

‘Aah, mine thinks.. mine thinkesh..’

Think thou of Troilus, oaf !!’.

‘Mayne thinketh…he is clomben on the stairs!’

In Piers Plowman the famously lisping double entendre;

Before the plough, her hills rise soft above me,

Her bounty mad to feel mine thinketh in.

The parallels here between ploughing and the act of procreation are hardly subtle, but are yet most capably drawn. And here again is that recurring, seemingly indispensable ‘mine thinketh’ sailing masonically through the years, immune to the vagaries of fashion, robust, resilient, unstoppable.

Carmody-Stack also points out how cleverly Shakespeare continues this progress, subtly sliding ‘mine thinket’ in and out of his plays so as to virtually go undetected to the untrained eye.

‘Mine thinketh the lady doth protest too much.’  Hamlet

‘Thine must be wrong, if all mine think it right,

To seek the cauldron in this fearsome night’. MacBeth.

Or, in The Bard’s retirement speech, from the boards of the Globe Theatre;

These years applause were meat and drink to me,

These plays were mine and how mine thank-ed thee!.

Not since John Dover-Wilson have we seen such penetrating intellect illumine the stormy developmental years of the English language. The subtleties that the good Professor has uncovered have gone unnoticed for far too long and deserve a wider audience than that available in the hallowed groves of academe.

That said, more recent research has discovered the continued use of this phrase amongst literary luminaries from Hazlitt to Wordsworth and on to Eliot.

The absence of the ‘th’ sound in all European languages (except English) easily explains the regular either/or use of ‘think’ or ‘tink’ depending on circumstance.