Which brings us to the famous "crack", popularly and recently Gaelicised as craic and advertised in countless retro-renovated bars throughout the land, as in "Live Ceol, Sandwiches and Craic". Non-Irish speakers in particular will insist on its ancient Gaelic lineage and will laboriously enunciate this shibboleth to foreigners who take it for a pharmacological rather than a social high. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary dates crack, "chat, talk of the news", to 1450. "Cracker" is "one who or that which cracks, sep. a boaster, a liar", reminding me of the Fermanagh use of "lie", meaning an impressively convincing tall stoy, or wind-up. As the late Eddie Duffy, flute-player and cracker would say, "The trouble with the young ones nowadays, they can play none, they can sing none, they can dance none, and they can tell no lies." In Belfast dialect, a cracker is a thing which is the best of its kind, a superlative. A good-looking woman is a "real cracker." The Belfast comedian Frank Carson (no relation), in the middle of whatever routine applause, would come out with his catch-phrase, "It's a cracker!".
It seems to me that "crack" was, until fairly recently, confined to the North of Ireland, for I remember Southerners would look somewhat nonplussed at our coming out with, "The crack was ninety" about an especially good session, or simply, "It was great crack".
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