Today’s word of the day, courtesy of Wiktionary, is qualtagh. According to the website, the qualtagh (or quaaltagh) is the first person one meets after leaving their house on New Year’s Day. The word derives from the Manx language (the Celtic language on the Isle of Man) and from a Manx tradition, though its background is somewhat complex. The pronunciation is “/ˈkwɑːltəx/, /ˈkwɑːltək/” in RP (received pronunciation, the officially correct pronunciation of the English language in England), “/ˈkwɑltək/” in General American speech, or “/ˈkweɪ(ə)ltəx/” in Manx. (If you want an explanation of the IPA letters, feel free to write a comment.)

There is no entry for qualtagh on the www.etymonling.com cite, but I found a very interesting discussion of the back of the word by Paul Anthony Jones at the Haggard Hawks website (https://www.haggardhawks.com/post/quaaltagh). Jones writes that

at the root of quaaltagh is the Manx word quaail, meaning “to meet” or “to assemble”; despite appearances, the name of the Irish parliament,, Dáil Éireann, is an etymological cousin. The –agh ending, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, is used in Manx to form “nouns expressing belonging”, with an extra T thrown in to the mix perhaps with a nod to an ancient Irish word, comaltae, meaning “companion” or “foster-brother” (which makes the modern Irish word comhaltacht, meaning “fellowship”, another distant relative).

Jones then goes on to explain that there is an old Manx tradition whereby a group of men goes out caroling at the homes of wealthier people. After singing, they are invited in for refreshments. “But as they entered the house they had totally just gatecrashed, one more local tradition came to bear: the first person across the threshold had to be of a dark complexion. Fair-haired guys—and girls of any complexion, for that matter—were strictly off limits:

On these occasions, a person of dark complexion always enters first, as a light-haired male or female is deemed unlucky to be a first-foot or quaaltagh on New Year’s Morning.

John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Britain (1873).”

This person became the “first foot,” or first person into the house, and the meaning of the word gradually changed to refer to the first foot one encountered on a special day, particularly on New Year’s Day.

On this date 205 years ago, the publishing firm of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones published a short, anonymous novel entitled Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. It had a foreword by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet, and a dedication to the English philosopher William Godwin. The author turned out to be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the daughter of Godwin and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The story is fairly well known, and the story behind the story is also well known. Residing in Geneva with her husband and George Gordon, Lord Byron, Shelley participated in a competition to see which of them could come up with the best horror story. At that time, theories about galvanism were prevalent. Specifically, Luigi Galvani believed, early in his career, that animals had animal electric fluid; he was eventually convinced by Alessandro Volta to revise his theories. But the image of a scientist using electricity to galvanize a dead body was intriguing.

While the novel is clearly a product of Romanticism and of the Gothic tradition, famous science fiction author Brian Aldiss asserted that Frankenstein was the first true science fiction story. He argued that the notion of a scientist deliberately experimenting in a laboratory to produce something is what makes it science fiction.

But whether the novel is science fiction or horror, I’m pretty sure that I would not want Frankenstein’s creature to be my qualtagh; not this year, and not any year.

Today’s image is from “Everything you need to know about holidaying on the Isle of Man” by Christian Kramer (May 25, 2020) on The Points Guy website (https://thepointsguy.co.uk/guide/holiday-isle-of-man/). The photo is of Port Erin and is credited to Roelf Odendaal/EyeEm/Getty Images. And I have to say that, based on this website, the Isle of Man is on my list of places to visit even if Frankenstein’s creature is waiting for me there.