Today’s word of the day (actually three words) from the Oxford English Dictionary is the Manx English
traa dy liooar, which literally means “time enough” in Manx, and as an expression in English means “time enough.” For example, if you’re planning to be late with something, you can blasély say, “Oh well, whatevs, traa dy liooar.” Or to quote (as OED does) a February 1, 2016, twitterage from @yn_albert_plm, “As ever we are a bit traa dy liooar!” As I was saying, whatevs. As an adjective and noun, it means procrastinational and procrastination. The OED gives its US pronunciation as /treɪ də ˈluər/. By the merest of coincidences, if
très de l’heure had a US pronunciation, it would probably be the same.
According to the OED’s etymology traa dy liooar comes from the Manx traa (time) plus “dy liooar, cognate with or formed similarly to Irish go leór enough (Early Irish co lór: see GALORE adv.).” Two observations. First, that’s interesting. Second, galore is an adverb?
Intuitively,
galore is an adjective. The OED defines it as an adverb (“in abundance or plenty”) and a noun (“abundance or plenty [
of something]”) (these square brackets represent parens in the dictionary, not my interpolation). The two noun examples illustrate a usage I’m not familiar with: e.g., “Galore of alcohol to ratify the trade” (from G. F. A. Ruxton’s “Life in the Far West” in
Blackwood’s Edinb. Mag., June 1848). All of the adverbial examples are idiomatically familiar to me. From Reade’s
Clouds & Sunsh. (1855): “They were set in a corner with beef and ale galore.”
Galore tells us that the noun (or nouns) it follows were abundant or plentiful. That’s the idiom in all of the OED’s examples.
Galore tells us nothing about how they were set, or about how they were set in a corner; it tells us the beef and ale were abundant or plentiful. It’s an adjective.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “Who cares if and/or whether galore is an adjective or an adverb?" My answer would be, “Well, I sure don’t, but a dictionary should.” My actual point is that it’s useful to refer to reference books, but you should do so with only a working assumption that they’re going to get everything right. You need to be open to the possibility that they’re mistaken. Sometimes you don’t need to refer to another authority; sometimes you can be the authority. We can see for ourselves that galore isn’t an adverb.
Another way of summarizing the point is that "it's in the dictionary" (as though there's such a thing as
the dictionary, but I'm distracting myself now), as I was saying, "it's in the dictionary" isn't necessarily always the final word.
