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| Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano accordion player! |
Bernard Share’s dictionary of Irish slang Slanguage, quotes Victoria White in the Irish Times, calling cat melodeon “the greatest expression in Hiberno-English.”
The word cat is used as an adjective to express disappointment in the quality of something: the food is cat in that place.
In his book on Irish traditional music, Ciaran Carson suggests that cat melodion is a joking reference to the musicianship of piano-accordion players (who often refer to their instruments as melodeons) to play two notes at once. Source
Where does Cat Melodeon come from?
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| The Cat Melodeon players |
As the nephew of a fine melodeon player, this is cat altogether - you throw in altogether for emphasis, by the way.
When was it first used?
Strangely, some dictionaries cite the first use in print as being in the 1980s. This is decades after I first heard the phrase. It has been in common use in spoken hiberno-English for at least a century.
How is it used?
Cat is a lexical Swiss army knife, but usually expresses displeasure. I have most often heard it as a yelp of protest: That film was cat altogether!'
A Foreign Country - a photo of a family gathering reveals a poignant story of Irish exile in the 20th Century. Free Medium read.