At a Loss for Words? Toasts Are Just a Click Away

Picked as best man in a friend’s Irish-themed wedding five years ago, Tom Donaghue needed a toast for the occasion. He thought the Internet would provide a bumper crop, but it was as barren as a field in a famine.

“There was nothing out there. That’s kind of crazy,” said Donaghue, who, after buying a book of sayings to bail himself out, created a Web site called Slainte! Toasts, Blessings, and Sayings at https://violet.umf.maine.edu/~donaghue/toasts.html to help others in the same predicament. “Slainte!” is Gaelic for “To your health!” and is pronounced, according to Donaghue, as if you quickly slurred “It’s a lawn chair!”

His ever-expanding compilation--collected through “word of mouth, books, articles, cards, calendars, cocktail napkins, graffiti on bathroom walls, you name it”--has sections devoted to Ireland, women, retirement, birthdays, children, St. Patrick and weddings. It includes gems such as “May you get all your wishes but one, so you always have something to strive for” and “May your home always be too small to hold all your friends” and “May you have food and raiment/ A soft pillow for your head/ May you be 40 years in heaven/ Before the devil knows you’re dead.”

“The appeal is a lot of them are just beautiful,” said Donaghue, 40, public relations director at the University of Maine at Farmington. “They’re either off-kilter humor or beautifully sentimental, and they’re kind of timeless.

“A lot of them are passed down verbally through the generations. But it wasn’t out there for the whole world to find,” he said. So Donaghue decided to take his place in the chain of that oral tradition and link it to the World Wide Web.

“It was also an exercise to learn to do HTML,” he said. He coded the site in what he called “the bad old days,” before the proliferation of easy Web site-authoring software. The university hosts the site for free--it encourages personal Web pages for its faculty and staff--and Donaghue jokes that even though part of his job is to post school information on the UMF Web site, his pages of sayings and toasts often get more traffic.

Donaghue, who is of Irish descent, said he’s always had an interest in that nation’s heritage. He grew up in an Irish neighborhood in Easton, Mass., just south of Boston. He heard Irish sayings from relatives and from members of the families all around--the Hurleys, the Kellys, the McLaughlins, the Sullivans. He studied Irish literature and history in college, and he annually volunteers at the Irish Cultural Festival at Stonehill College, in his hometown.

The basis of the Web site is “not so much the stereotype of Irish drinking as it is the Irish wit,” he said. In addition to the humble, pithy sayings uttered in pubs and in pews, the site features quotes from the leading lights of the Irish literary tradition, among them Brendan Behan, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde, who said, “Work is the curse of the drinking class.”

But it also features sayings from sources beyond the Emerald Isle, including Groucho Marx, the Old Testament and “Caddyshack.” He’s gotten submissions ranging from bawdy to banal, sent from Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, “all the way over to the next town over here in Farmington, Maine,” he said. A woman in New Brunswick, Canada, e-mailed when she came upon Donaghue’s Web site after her father died.

“There on the page were two of the sayings he used to give at their Thanksgiving celebrations every year,” but that she could never remember in their entirety, Donaghue said. Now that she had them, she told him, she planned to stitch them onto a pillow as a keepsake.

The site also includes the saying Donaghue finally chose for his best man’s toast in 1996: “May you be poor in misfortune/ Rich in blessings/ Slow to make enemies/ And quick to make friends/ But rich or poor, quick or slow/ May you know nothing but happiness/ From this day forward.”

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Steve Carney is a freelance writer.