The word hame is usually found in the plural: hames are two curved wooden or metal pieces forming part of the collar of a draught animal’s harness; they fit around the neck and the traces are fastened to them. (A draught/draft animal is one used for muscular work, typically pulling – i.e., drawing – a cart, plough, or other heavy load.)
In Ireland, though, hames has been repurposed in the informal idiom make a hames of, meaning make a mess or a hash of. It implies the mess has resulted from carelessness, clumsiness, or ineptitude: a sports player who misses an easy opportunity, or a baker who forgets the leavening agent, can be said to have made a hames of it.
Hames is sometimes preceded by a modifying or intensifying term: you could make a right hames, a fierce hames, an almighty hames, an awful hames, or a complete and total hames of a task. Browsing Google Books we find a variety of things being made a hames of: jobs, plays, heists, documents, Bibles, sums, relationships, Socialism:
This was a good start: my first salaried job and I was making a hames of it. (Robert E. Tangney, Other Days Around Me)
I made a right haimes of my suit. (Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds)
Neil hated computers and could make a hames of the slightest little thing. (Patricia Scanlan, Two for Joy)
Why should a carefully-prepared document be made a hames of by a typographically illiterate user who has set to display as 44pt Punk Bold in diagonal purple and green stripes? (TEX Users Group, Vol. 16, 1995)
Often it’s just it that appears at the end of the phrase, in which case the expression refers to something made obvious by the context:
Expressed at its simplest, it’s ‘You can’t let the Irish run the country, sure they’d make a hames of it.’ (David McKittrick, Endgame: The search for peace in Northern Ireland)
‘How did I make a hames of your play?’ asked F. J. ‘You made a hames of it at that particular line when Donal says…’ (Garry O’Connor, Sean O’Casey: A Life)
Make a hames of is very much an Irish expression. Its meagre results in Google’s vast books corpus, and its total absence from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (and the Historical one), testify to the idiom’s limited province. But it’s in active use here. I heard it regularly growing up, and still do. I love how it sounds, and I use it myself.
A search on the Irish Times website shows several recent instances of its use from politicians, spokepersons, and journalists themselves, including the memorable line ‘But why is the young Irish male making such a hames of the hip-hop hug?’ It even shows up in headlines. More informal examples may be found in the Boards.ie forums.
The OED says hame is from Middle Dutch (Dutch haam) corresponding to Middle High German ham(e) = fishing rod, of unknown origin. Why it was incorporated into make of hames of is uncertain: maybe because it’s difficult to put hames on the right way. Michael Quinion says his ‘carriage-driving consultant tells me it’s all too easy to put the hames on a horse the wrong way up, thus making a complete mess of things’. Terence Dolan tentatively supports this etymology.
Chambers Slang Dictionary mentions hame and haym as variants of haim (etymology unknown), jazz lingo for ‘a job other than in the music business; . . . a job, usually tedious or unpleasant’, but there’s no obvious connection with the hames discussed above. I could try to forge one speculatively, but I would probably make a hames of it.
John Hawkes as Sol Star in Deadwood (2004–2006)
Updates:
See this Twitter chat about Irish words that hames might have come from, including @Karenwq4’s suggestion seamlas whose meanings include shambles and mess, and a related list from Dulach Glynn.
Eugene McCabe’s great novel Death and Nightingales uses the word’s polysemy to make a pun:
Mickey was saying that old Grue the hedgemaster told him once it was an Irishman showed the Roman engineers how to make the great roads of the empire.
‘How is it,’ said Jim Ruttledge, ‘we’ve such poor sign of them here?’
‘If we had the reins in our own hands,’ Mickey said, ‘you’d see silver chariots here on golden roads to blind the world.’
‘More like,’ says Jim Ruttledge, ‘you’d make a hames of the whole show . . . that’s if you were fit to make a hames.’
There was laughter which Mickey did not join.
The phrase ‘it was an Irishman showed the Roman engineers’, with its elided relative pronoun (who or that) after ‘Irishman’, is an example of a subject contact clause, a characteristic feature of Irish English grammar, among others.
Sentence first 
A word/phrase I use quite frequently.
Re your ending comment; I probably would too.
Mona: Me too, and I’ve always liked it. Welcome, by the way.
Marc: Not that the hames factor always discourages me from speculative etymology, but today it will.
Interesting stuff Stan. It’s a great expression which I use quite often too
Stan ~ I use it too but nearly always with the qualifier “a right” and as a variation when I get too repetitive : “a right banjax”.
Have you dealt with banjax in past posts?
XO
WWW
Your post made me smile Stan! Like wisewebwoman it was “a right hames” we made of things growing up. In spite of the implications, it didn’t sound too harsh and I still like the sound of it. I only heard “banjax” used as a verb, as in “you banjaxed that”!
Shaun: Glad to hear it. I’m curious about what other countries it has any currency in, so adding the UK and Canada makes three and counting.
WWW: Many’s the time I use “a right hames” myself! I haven’t written about banjax(ed) yet but I’ll try to at some point.
Herself: That’s very true, that it’s not necessarily a harsh word – though the political examples in the Irish Times are often intended to be very critical. But it can be used gently and light-heartedly too, and often is.
Stan,
Thanks so much for this post. This is a phrase (among many, many others) that completely puzzled me when I moved to Ireland as a kid, because I’d never heard it in the US. I’ve always wanted to know where it came from and what it meant.
Stan,
Thanks for this illuminating article.
I would venture to guess that like most fellow North Americans (excluding expat Irishmen), most have rarely, if ever, heard the Irish-centric phrase “make a hames of it”, on this side of The Pond.
At first blush, I rather like the sound of it. I may start using it, but would likely get some odd looks in return. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Here in the U.S., (and Canada) we would likely merely say, “make a mess of it”, or “botch it up”, which hardly has the charm, or arcane air of your popular Irish-rooted phrase for messing up, or bungling.
I was fishing around for a Yiddish equivalent, thinking “shlimazl” might readily replace “hames”. But in consulting Michael Wex’s informative book, “Born to Kvetch”, found that “shlimazl” is defined as “bad luck, or someone who has had bad luck”… (mazel= luck).
So clearly my intuition on that one was way off-base.
If there are any Yiddish speakers out there who might know a specific word for “messing up” in Yiddish, it would be cool to know.
There has to be at least one, if not a slew of appropriate words, or phrases. The early creators of Yiddish appeared to thrive on coming up w/ choice words to describe aspects of the imperfect human condition; particularly our many short-comings, foibles, and nagging bad habits. Oy Veh!
The phrase is alive & well in East Galway. But we’re always making a mess out of things I suppose.
Nurn: You’re very welcome. I was curious too about its origin, and had no idea of the harness connection until I looked into it.
Alex: You’re probably right: most people in the US and Canada would not be familiar with the expression. I asked on Twitter about its currency in AmE, and public radio’s A Way with Words (who specialise in dialects and obscure phrases) said it didn’t seem to be in use there.
Kevin: Ha. Thanks for the report from across the county. It’s in use in north Galway, too. Hasn’t really caught on internationally, though. Not yet.
When I was a young man we were of the impression that a “hames” referred to – making a mess of a situation through carelessness. It was likened the situation to allowing the reins to become tangled in the hames or collar.
Val: Yes, carelessness (or incompetence) often seems to be involved. The harness connection seems most likely.
Googling site:debates.oireachtas.ie throws up many nice examples; e.g.:
– That would have been, perhaps, a venial sin if they had got it right; but in their anxiety to get something published, they have made more than a little “hames” of it
– making the biggest hames of an IT project in the history of the State
– I reject any notion that a hames has been made of the property market or stamp duty.
– “There seemed to be a hames being made of many things in the middle of the night a few years ago when there was nobody around to discuss them.”
– ” I thank in particular our Swedish visitors and I apologise for making such a hames of announcing their names.”
And a 1951 example of the original meaning:
– ” In their present uniforms Gardaí are tightened up to the neck, as if they were wearing a collar and hames.”
That’s a fine set of examples, mollymooly. Thank you. I especially like the one referring to the names of Swedish visitors.
On Twitter, @excitedstoat drew my attention to Paul Muldoon’s poem ‘Glaucus’, which he has posted on The Glass-Bottom Blog and which seems to play on the two meanings of hames.
[…] Carey served up the origin of the word treacle, and on his own blog did not make a hames of the word hames. He also had some fun with the Fargo […]
I dunno. I think the harness idea is a long and unlikely shot. I suspect it’s one of those Hiberno-English concoctions like hooligan and shenanigan, arising from the name Seamus (used for detective I believe in America) playing on ‘shame’ and the ‘mus/mess’ and perhaps even the vocative of ‘a Sheamus’ (sp?) which turns that s into a ‘h’ i.e. sounds like ‘a hame-ish.’ Will check out my Hiberno-English dictionary when I get home. Back shortly …
ps love the idea of your blog. I’ll follow.
Thanks for your visit, OR, and for the interesting etymological suggestion. I find it more unlikely than the difficult-harness proposal, but without conclusive evidence, who’s to say for sure.
Right, both Bernard Share’s Slanguage and Terence Patrick Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-Engish back up your suggestion, but I am not convinced; chiefly because ‘hame’ is an English word (from old Dutch and German) and the English themselves have never used it this way. Logically, anything that is used solely by the Irish – e.g. twig, meaning ‘to understand’- is far more likely to have come from the Irish language. And, of course, the same word or word sound can coincidentally exist in different languages without having any relation to each other.
Logically, anything that is used solely by the Irish – e.g. twig, meaning ‘to understand’- is far more likely to have come from the Irish language.
Hardly. Consider Stephen Dedalus’s tundish from A Portrait of the Artist:
But it is Stephen who looks it up, and here’s what he finds:
There are many other such survivals in Ireland, though not as many as in the United States, where fall ‘autumn’, platter ‘dish’, mad ‘angry’, I guess ‘I suppose, I reckon’ (which latter is archaic or dialectal in the U.S.), gotten ‘got’ in the sense of ‘obtained’, trash ‘household waste’, dumb ‘stupid’ (reinforced by German dumm), and many other words are still current, though lost (or seen as American inventions!) in the U.K.
Tundish is a good counterexample to OR’s assertion, and of course there are many others. But I’m still inclined to think that a term used only by Irish people is more likely to be of Irish origin. If I can I’ll look into this more sometime.
OR: That’s all true, and you make a good case. I like the idea of the word coming from Séamus, but I’m not qualified to make the call. The definite etymology, for now, remains elusive.
Cinnte. But I think Slanguage, HIberno-English dictionaries, language blogs et al should put “origin unknown” – as Collins do for the American word ‘patsy’ though I would suggest it also relates to an Irish name – instead of randomly proposing this pluralised English harness word which has no relation whatsoever to the meaning or use of ‘hames.’
[…] For further information on the etymology of ‘to make a hames’ of, please read Stan Carey’s blog: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/ […]
Thanks Stan. I have updated my post to include your link and the Twitter thread,
Thanks, Dulach. It was a fun discussion.
Interesting. Following Dulach’s oral/aural approach… might be a possible older Irish derivation…
éimdid (variants: féimdid, (f)eimdid, éimdhidh) is generally used in the sence of ‘refuses, rejects’, but a secondary usage is that of ‘fails’. Usuage is attested in Imtheachta Aeniasa, a translation of Vergil’s Aeneid, pre 1400 AD.
A subsequent corruption of the éim/ (f)eim aural element, especially if a h was involved along the way (h-éim,or fheim?) could possibly have produced a similar sound to modern day ‘hame’.
That’s an interesting suggestion, thank you. We have no shortage of candidates now.
[…] Hames means mess, and is usually used in the phrase make a hames of something. There’s an implication […]
Wonderful! I came across this in a song called Sullivan John where a fella gets a ‘rap of a hames’ at the horse fair in Spancil Hill. I had heard it used frequently growing up, meaning to make a mess of. I asked my parents if they could think of any connection between the two meanings and they suggested that since the hames balanced the reins, that if they were put on wrong it was a mess!
Thanks, Rosie! I just had a listen to The Dubliners singing that song. I’m more familiar with the ‘make a mess’ sense than the horse-related one, but it’s a great word either way. Your parents might be right about how the two meanings are connected, though we may not ever know for sure.
[…] work for his own New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language and made an absolute hames of the entry for curmudgeon. Wildly misinterpreting Johnson’s questionable etymology, he betrayed […]
O.R.Melling noted the origin of the English hame, and that the English have never used it that way. But one has to wonder why not, when the OED gives this marvellous citation:
1883 J. P. Groves From Cadet to Captain xxii. 223 Harnessing‥Nellie’s ponies‥he managed to get the hames upside down, with the kidney-links on the top of the collars
Sorry to have only just caught up with this post
It had another, older meaning in English too: ‘A covering, esp. a natural covering, integument; skin, membrane, slough (of a serpent)’, as the OED defines it, marking it obsolete. It was spelt ham in Old English and appeared in Beowulf.
[…] Besides making a ‘haimes’ (translates as mess) of the pockets, I am rather pleased with the dress, the cut is very tidy and […]
I found this looking up “hames”, which occurs in Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End”, written a sort of Irish way.
A synonym I heard recently is baileabhair, a loan word from Irish. According to dictionaries its chief sense is ‘fool’, but I only ever use it and hear it used to mean ‘mess’, generally in a phrase like ‘made a baileabhair of it’.
“Shamus” as detective has Yiddish origins, though perhaps influenced by the Irish name.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/shamus
[…] March 2022, including Irish words used in Irish English. I’ve written about some of these before (hames, notions, plámás, ráiméis, ruaille buaille); others include a chara, blow-in, bockety, ceol, […]