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Published 01/10/24
bladair m. [ˈb̥ɫ̪ɑd̪̥aɾʲ], -[ɛɾʲ],
/bLadɛrʲ/ ‘flatterer, sycophant; babbler’ (AFB˄).
also bladaire [ˈb̥ɫ̪ɑd̪̥əɾʲə],
MacLennan 1925: [blăd´-ur-ȧ] ‘wide mouth, babbler, flatterer’; Dieckhoff 1932: (Glengarry) [bLadərˈjə] ‘babbler’.
‘flatterer; babbler’. Cameron (1894, 620) claims the word is connected with, if not borrowed from, Old Norse blaðra vb ‘to babble, talk incoherently’ (NO), although his editor MacBain suggests it is more likely to have been borrowed from Eng. blatter, < Lat. blaterāre; cf. EG bladar sb. (with a medial plosive) ‘flattery’ (Ir. idem
-/ər/ (teanglann.ie˄, s.v. bladar); also blandar (Ó Dónaill 1977).
), which eDIL˄ suggests may be an English loan.
McDonald (2009, 342) cites both SG bladh and bladair under his entry for ON blaðra and finds the loan unlikely. However, SG bladh m. ‘fame’ (EG blaḋ f., cognate with [Ice.] blaðr nt. ‘nonsense’ (MacBain 1911, s.v. bladh)) is only indirectly related to SG bladair and may have been inadvertently included in copying text from MacBain, where the one word follows immediately upon the other.
SG bladair and bladaire are possibly loan-shifts from Scots bledder [′blɛdər], [′bledɪr], a variant of blether, blather [′blɛðər], ‘one who talks foolishly or profusely; chatterbox’ (< OScots bladder ‘to stammer, talk nonsense’, itself from ON blaðra (cf. SND˄; de Vries 1962)), with its ending substituted with the Gaelic suffixes -air and -aire, although they are conceivably Gaelic formations based upon SG blad (see below).
There may also have been a degree of semantic conflation between SG bladair and SG bleidir ‘beggar, teazing petitioner; impertinent fellow; coward; pilferer; wolf’, q.v.
Derivatives: In addition to either bladair or bladaire, Shaw (1780) gives blad ‘dirty mouth’ and bladairam ‘to flatter’ (leg. bladaiream ‘I flatter’); Armstrong (1825) cites blad m. ‘mouth, dirty mouth, foul or abusive mouth’, bladach adj. and the abstract noun bladaireachd f.; HSS (1828) has blad m. ‘wide mouth’, bladach adj., and the abstract nouns bladaireachd f. and bladar m.
The HSS entry reads, ‘Bladar m. (blad) “dissimulation, flattery ...” Bibl. Gloss’. The word bladar occurs in Bedell’s Irish Bible (≈[1817] Psalms 5:9: do níd bladar le na tteangaidh) and is explained by Robert Kirk in the glossary appended to his 1690 rendition of Bedell as ‘slíomadoireachd, spleaghachas, miodal, dissembling’ (see EEBO-TCP: An Biobla Naomhtha). The content of this entry is the same as occurs in MS Egerton 158 (Stokes 1907, 149, Item 90: ‘bladar, slīomadóireacht, spleghachas, miodal Dissembling’), whose provenance is discussed in Ó Baoill 1986.
For SG blad, cf. Ir. (Antrim) blad m. (Dinneen 1947: ‘mouth, open mouth’). While it is perhaps possible that SG and Ir. blad are back-formations from blada(i)r, it seems more probable they are loans from Scots blaud, blawd, blad, blaad ‘blast (of wind), downpour (of rain); stroke, blow; (figuratively) abuse’ and, here, specifically in the sense ‘mouth, the organ that produces the abuse’.
Cf. SG clab ‘mouth’ < Eng. clap ‘noise → tongue’ (MacBain 1911, s.v. clab; OED˄, s.v. clap II 9.b), so that SG (Glengarry) dùin do bhlad (Dieckhoff 1932, s.v. blad) is the equivalent of SG dùin do chlab ‘shut your mouth’.