What Is an Irish Goodbye? The English Called It French

At the last big party you went to, somebody left without a word to the host, and nobody noticed until the coat was gone from the bed. In the United States that exit has a name, and the name blames the Irish.

They are late additions to a list of suspects, and one sentence of Proust has had its culprit changed twice by his English translators.

What is an Irish goodbye?

An Irish goodbye is leaving a party without saying goodbye to the host or anyone else. The phrase is American slang that barely appears in books before 2013. It is a new name for an old idea: English speakers were saying take French leave, for slipping off without notice, by 1741, and the French call it leaving the English way.

The phrase Irish goodbye is almost absent from books before 2013

Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts how often a phrase appears in scanned books, puts “Irish goodbye” at zero in every year before 2013 apart from a handful of stray hits. It jumps that year and roughly quadruples by 2022, the last year the tool covers. Even then, “French leave” turns up about ten times as often.

Google’s separate American and British collections point to where the new name started. It appears in American books every year from 2012, but in British books only in scattered years until 2017. Quartz reported in 2017 that it had been turning up in US newspapers and pop culture only for the previous eight years.

The Irish site The Daily Edge ran a straw poll in its own offices in 2015 and found that few people had heard of it “being used by real live Irish people, but by Americans, and in TV and film.”

The stories of why it is called an Irish goodbye are guesses

Several stories circulate. In one, famine emigrants slipped away to spare everyone a tearful farewell. In another, Irish Catholics left Mass straight after Communion and skipped the closing prayer. A third, which Slate put down in 2013 to “unfortunate historical stereotyping”, says the person leaving was too drunk to manage a proper goodbye.

None of them comes with a dated example of anyone using the phrase. The famine and Mass stories are folk etymology, built backwards from the name like the story of the French egg cup that supposedly gave the word cocktail its name. The drinking stereotype is the explanation most people accept, The Daily Edge noted, but it too is a reading of the name rather than a record of who coined it. American papers were doing the same for paint the town red by 1884, and Pascal Treguer of Word Histories has collected seven such explanations as folk etymologies.

The same piece objected: “why are we getting saddled with other people’s bad manners?” Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists more than 90 slang terms built on Irish, among them an Irish promotion for a pay cut, and advises treating all of them as derogatory unless marked otherwise. Irish goodbye itself is not listed. Spanish once singled out the Irish too: a Madrid dictionary of 1787 says the city gave the name gringo particularly to the Irish, for an accent that kept them from speaking natural Castilian.

English speakers blamed the French by 1741

The idea behind the name is older than the United States. The earliest example in Green’s comes from 1741, in an anonymous novel called Benedicta, where a Mrs Butler “had taken French leave of her pillow”.

A satirical rondeau in The Polite Politician, a collection dated 1751, already treats it as a stock phrase: “French Leave is a phrase we had often in use, / When one slily elop’d; nor left coin or excuse”. Its later lines aim the joke at French troops in Brabant and Flanders, who “strip all their hosts to bear something away”.

The Idioms, an online idiom dictionary, dates the first recorded use to 1771, “soon after the Seven Years’ War”, and suggests the phrase may have grown out of the rivalry between Britain and France. The war ran from 1756 to 1763, so the phrase was in print 15 years before it began.

The 1771 date belongs to the earliest example in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Smollett’s novel Humphry Clinker, in which a lady’s maid writes that a valet “stole away an Irishman’s bride, and took a French leave of me and his master”.

The same dictionary defines French leave as “the custom (in the 18th c. prevalent in France and sometimes imitated in England) of going away from a reception, etc. without taking leave of the host or hostess”. The French in french fries named a way of cooking regarded as French, and the French in French leave named a way of behaving.

Not everyone treated the habit as rude. John Trusler’s etiquette manual Principles of Politeness explained in the 1770s that “the taking what is called a French leave was introduced, that on one person’s leaving the company the rest might not be disturbed”, and called it “that piece of politeness”.

France calls it leaving the English way

The French phrase is filer a l’anglaise, to slip off the English way, which Larousse defines as leaving without anyone noticing. It is the younger of the two: Le Figaro says the English version came first by a long way, and Slate says the French have used theirs since “at least the late 1800s”.

Proust used the variant partir a l’anglaise in La Prisonniere, published in 1923. At the Verdurins’ house, the professor Brichot tells the narrator that they cannot leave that way and must first go and say goodbye to Mme Verdurin.

C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1929 translation kept Proust’s nationality: “we cannot slip away, English fashion.” Terence Kilmartin’s 1981 revision, as Quartz spotted, swapped in the English idiom that blames the French: “we can’t take French leave.” D.J. Enright’s revision, first published in 1992, put the English back, and Carol Clark’s 2002 translation for Penguin left the nationality out: “we can’t just walk out like that.”

Depending on which English translation you open, the same sentence of Proust blames the English, the French or nobody at all.

The blame travels round Europe in a circle

ZEITmagazin traced the circle in 2014. German has two versions: the polnischer Abgang, or Polish exit, heard mostly in Berlin and the east, and sich franzoesisch verabschieden, taking leave the French way, more common in the west.

What Germany calls Polish, the magazine noted, Poland calls English, England calls French and France calls English again. Its verdict: “Es sind immer die anderen, die sich davonschleichen” - it is always the others who sneak off.

Language	Phrase	Who gets the blame
English	take French leave	The French
American English	Irish goodbye, Irish exit	The Irish
French	filer a l’anglaise	The English
German	sich franzoesisch verabschieden, polnischer Abgang	The French, the Poles
Polish	wyjsc po angielsku	The English
Russian	uyti po-angliyski	The English
Italian	andarsene alla francese, andarsene all’inglese	The French, the English
Spanish	despedirse a la francesa	The French

Whoever slips out of the next party without a word is doing what an etiquette manual of the 1770s called “that piece of politeness”, under a name that caught on only in the 2000s. Strictly FYI.