Citations:racy of the soil

English citations of racy of the soil and racy of one's soil

Adjective: deeply connected to a place

• 1841 October "Memoirs of Modern Statesmen, No. 1: Sir Robert Peel; Chapter II" The Citizen: Or, Dublin Monthly Magazine (Dublin, Samuel J. Machen) vol.4 no.24 p.199:

  Except for the intonations of his voice, and the dropping of a jest savouring of the real Irish flavour ... no one would now suspect, from personal intercourse with him, that the ex-secretary of the admiralty is an Irishman. But sometimes he cannot help shewing that even still (to use the expressive phrase of the late lamented Chief Baron Woulfe), he is "racy of our soil."

• 1842 November "Character of the Right Honourable Stephen Woulfe" The Dublin Magazine (Dublin, Samuel J. Machen) pp.279-280:

  Nor should his reply to Peel ever be forgotten, when the wily Tory leader raised the question, "Cui bono Corporations?—What good will they do in Ireland—a poor country, with little trade?" "I will tell the Right Honourable Baronet," answered Woulfe; "they will go far to CREATE AND TO FOSTER PUBLIC OPINION IN IRELAND, AND TO MAKE IT RACY OF THE SOIL,"—words which embody with inimitable terseness the objects of an Irish patriot-statesman.

• 1846 Thomas Macnevin, The Confiscation of Ulster, in the Reign of James the First, Commonly Called the Ulster Plantation (Dublin: James Duffy) 2nd edition, p.206:

  Before the Plantation—before Hugh O'Neill had hidden his great defeat and greater sorrows beneath an English coronet—from these Forests issued, and roamed over these Plains, a Free People, ruled by their own rude laws and institutions, adoring at their own altars, assembling round their own hearths, speaking the language racy of their soil and of their souls, loving, tender, vengeful, fierce, after the fashion their mother's milk had given them,—a people of the Land, her children, like the oaks they dwelt amongst, bursting from her bosom like the streams upon whose banks they fought and loved, and lived and died.

• 1884 December 18, Thomas Croke, "To Mr Michael Cusack, Honorary Secretary of the Gaelic Athletic Association" (published in The Freeman’s Journal, 24 December 1884):

  We have got such foreign and fantastic field sports as lawn-tennis, polo, croquet, cricket, and the like—very excellent, I believe, and health-giving exercises in their way, still not racy of the soil, but rather alien, on the contrary, to it, as are, indeed, for the most part the men and women who first imported and still continue to patronise them.

• 1893 Alfred Colbeck, Scarlea Grange : or, a Luddite's daughter (London: Religious Tract Society)

  Billy Brown was not only too loquacious for Trevelyan, but the flavour of his dialect was a little too racy of the soil to be easily understood by a Cornishman, and he wished him 'Good-morning'.

• 1899 September 15, The Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, Kansas) p.7:

  It is too racy of the soil of England. Its bouquet is so characteristically Anglican that it will never be properly appreciated and patronized in the new world.

• 1908 Kelly Miller, "The Artistic Gifts of the Negro" Race adjustment; essays on the Negro in America p.234:

  Negro melody has been called the only autochthonous music of the American Continent. The inner soul of the red man is not preserved to us in song. The European brought his folk-thought and folk-song acquired by his ancestors in the unremembered ages. It was reserved for the transplanted African to sing a new song racy of the soil, which had been baptized with his blood and watered with his tears.

• 1912 Charles Whibley, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume VIII. The Age of Dryden; VI. The Restoration Drama; § 14. The Confederacy:

  None of his versions is memorable, save The Confederacy (1705), englished from d’Ancourt’s Les Bourgeoises à la Mode, and completely transformed in the process. As mere sleight of hand, The Confederacy claims our admiration. Closely as it follows the original, it is racy of our soil. As you read it, you think, not of the French original, but of Middleton and Dekker.

• 1939 July 12, Christopher Michael Byrne, "Tourist Traffic Bill, 1938—Committee Stage" Seanad Éireann debates:

  There is no reason why some effort should not be made to see that visitors to this country would be brought into contact with the various feiseanna and oireachteanna held up and down the country, where they would see what is Irish and racy of the soil and be given an idea of what our own traditional amusements were.

• 2001 August 11, "Blending in while still standing out" The Irish Times:

  He's the epitome of Dublin flash, he's the one-season wonder, he's soccer swagger and basketball shapes and he's TV presenter glamourous and his face doesn't fit and none of his story is racy of the soil, none of it is pure GAA.

• 2014 April 19, Seán Moran, "Five-ish things the GAA can learn from the Sky television deal" The Irish Times

  RTÉ pundit Joe Brolly echoed this concern from his racy-of-the soil redoubt in the weekend’s Mail on Sunday.

• 2015 April, Peter Robert Gardner, "Unionism, Loyalism, and the Ulster‐Scots Ethnolinguistic ‘Revival’" Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism vol 15 issue 1

  As David Trimble was among the first to recognize, something more racy of the soil would be required to make Unionism culturally competitive

• 2016 April 30, Paddy Woodworth, "Patrick Pearse: Nature lover and warmonger" The Irish Times:

  On the other hand most 19th- and early-20th-century naturalists and conservationists in Ireland came predominantly from among the Anglo-Irish, and were not exactly racy of the soil.

Adjective: deeply connected to the land; rural or rustic; earthy

• 1904 May 13, "Amusing breach of promise case: The undertaker and the widow" The Irish Times p. 7:

  Mrs. Brennan then came in and refreshments were called for, and the proposal and acceptance were celebrated in a manner thoroughly racy of the soil. (Laughter.)

• 1924 Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not (Parade's End, Part 1) VI:

  In the hedge: our lady's bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor's button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear): so interesting! Cowslip (paigle, you know from the old French pasque, meaning Easter); burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; black bryony; wild clematis, later it's old man's beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maid's long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!)

• 1935 May 3, Milton Bronner, "The Reign of 'George the Wise'" The Indianapolis Times p.21 col.5:

  In the 1923 elections it became apparent that labor would probably come into power for the first time in English history. ... These men, sprung from the people, with no snobbish bend in their backs, talked to the king as man to man, told him stories racy of the soil, and he thoroughly enjoyed it.

• 2003 January 7, Fintan O'Toole, "Farm demo is simply anti-change" The Irish Times:

  Like the Church, the farmers exerted an unquestionable influence for the first 50 years of the State's existence. ... Just as to be truly Irish you had to be Catholic, you also had to be racy of the soil.