Meaning
The floozie (or floosie or floozy) in the jacuzzi is the
nickname of the bronze statue, properly called Anna Livia, previously in
O'Connell Street, Dublin, Ireland. It personifies the River Liffey, which
passes nearby. Birmingham, UK, has a similar statue and has adopted the same
nickname for it.
Origin
The use of scurrilous nicknames for their public monuments
says much about the character of Dubliners, two facets of which are a readiness
to deflate pomposity and a love of language. The second of these could be
described as a playful seriousness with words and is surely commendable.
The 'floozie', also called 'the hoor in the sewer' (hoor,
pronounced who-er, is the local version of whore) was removed in 2001 to make
way for an impressively tall column that the city fathers like to call The
Spire of Dublin. The local wags competed to rename this even before it was
completed as 'the stiletto in the ghetto', 'the erection at the intersection',
the 'stiffy by the Liffey', 'the North Pole', 'the nail in the Pale' and so on.
There are many other statues and monuments in Dublin that
have been renamed by the public. In fact this is such a well-established game
in the many bars of the city that it's hard to imagine any new edifice not
being given its own rhyme. Some of the more notable are:
The 'tart with the cart', or 'the dish with the fish' - the
statue of Molly Malone, the fictional character of the eponymous song, shown
wheeling her wheelbarrow of fish. The 'quare in the square' - the statue of
Oscar Wilde in Merrion Park Square (quare is a local pronunciation of
queer).The 'prick with a stick' - James Joyce carrying a walking cane. The
'hags with the bags' - the statue of two women with shopping bags near the
Halfpenny Bridge. The 'time in the slime' - the ill-fated underwater clock
(yes, really) in the River Liffey.
It isn't only the general public of Dublin who enjoy
wordplay. The city has been associated with a huge number of major figures in
the world of literature, several of them Nobel laureates, including Samuel
Beckett, Brendan Behan, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce , Flann O’Brien, George
Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats. Many of these have a
humorous and irreverent style and a wilful disregard for grammatical convention
enough to make Lynne Truss weak at the knees. Here's an example from Brendan
Behan (the self-confessed "drinker with writing problems") who, when
asked to define the difference between prose and poetry, is reported as saying:
"There was a young fellah named Rollocks
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks.
As he walked on the Strand
With his girl by the hand
The tide came up to his knees.
Now that’s prose. If the tide had been in, it would have been
poetry."
That incident is part of Irish literary folklore and if you
take one of Dublin's enjoyable literary pub-crawls you are sure to hear it
repeated. There's precious little evidence to prove that Behan ever said it
though and it doesn't appear anywhere in his published work or autobiography -
so perhaps best taken with a pinch of salt (or maybe a Guinness or two). The
point though is that it is the kind of thing that Behan might well have said
and fits exactly into the local literary and social style.
