“If this be Irish gratitude, I could wish myself a Frenchman”

Abstract This article provides an initial approach to historical (im)politeness strategies in the context of letter writing. It uses a sub-corpus of coriecor which contains letters written by Irish immigrants that relocated to the US and their intimates. The article focusses on reproaches ( Albelda Marco 2023 ; Tulimirović 2023 ) and it applies Archer’s (2017) model to all instances of this speech act extracted from the data. This results in two different sub-corpora, one containing what is here defined as “Face Enhancing Reproaches” ( fer ) and “Face Aggravating Reproaches” ( far ). These two sub-corpora are contrasted through the Sketch Engine software and the most predominant lemmas in fer ( still, before, what, your, account, home, uneasy, dear, like and wish ) are analysed and discussed in relation to their function for (im)politeness purposes. This article sheds light on the face-enhancing value of these linguistic items to encode this speech act within the specific context in question.