August 2011 was “gender English” month at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, and a few of my recent posts there focus on this aspect of the language.

In “Problems with pronouns”, I address the issue of gender-neutral third person singular personal pronouns (I’m a singular-they man, myself), and wonder about the effectiveness of an experiment in Egalia, a pre-school in Sweden which forsakes gendered pronouns altogether:

Plural pronouns (they, them, their, themselves) have been used for centuries to refer to singular antecedents, not only in informal speech but in classic literature. This raises the hackles of sticklers, though, who protest that it contravenes grammatical concord. The influence of Google+ should give singular they a boost, but Facebook ran into difficulty here. Themself – which centuries ago was used where we now use themselves – is occasionally resorted to, but it is a non-standard form. [more]

My next post, “Getting cute about gender”, looks at the etymology and historical and contemporary senses of cute, a word whose usage is strongly skewed by gender. It also has a usage peculiar to Ireland:

Irish English has a version of this lesser sense of cute that is typically heard in the colloquialism “cute hoor”. Hoor in this case derives from whore but doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with sex; rather, it’s a general term of abuse applied usually to males, often corrupt ones. A cute hoor is someone cunning and devious. It’s commonly heard in political contexts, and has given rise to the noun phrase “cute hoorism”:

This is the kind of political cute hoorism that has the economy where it is today. (Irish Times, 30 June 2011)

Like many Irish insults, hoor is sometimes used with affection, even respect. It can also indicate strong or unhealthy fondness (“He’s an awful hoor for the horses/drink”). [more]

In “Finding the riot words”, I write about some of the linguistic aspects of the recent riots in England, for example the debate over what to call the people who were rioting:

The BBC was criticised for continuing to use the word protesters for a few days after the term had become inappropriate. The broadcaster later admitted it had made a mistake; Fran Unsworth, BBC News head of newsgathering, added:

We try not to be too prescriptive, but yes we have said actually that they’re not protesters they’re clearly rioters and looters. They are more descriptive terms and we should try and be as accurately descriptive as we can be.

Though the BBC went out of its way to avoid terms that could be considered judgemental, other media outlets and commentators were less cautious. All sorts of words were used to refer to the rioters – looters, thieves, criminals, hooligans, thugs, yobs, idiots, cretins, scum, terrorists, feral underclass. A few of these are, to use Unsworth’s phrase, accurately descriptive; others are loaded with prejudice or carry a nasty subtext. [more]

Back to gender: “Fighting fire with ‘firefighter’” is about how some words become outdated for political reasons, and what dictionaries do as meanings “shift and drift and settle anew”:

Dictionaries record how language is used, so they can’t simply ignore sexist and discriminatory usages – or new terms that supersede them – no matter how objectionable some people might find them. But by tagging words and adding usage notes, dictionaries can point out controversies, indicate that a word is non-standard or politically incorrect, and trust to readers’ judgement. . . .

One of the arguments against gender-biased terms like fireman and chairman is that they suggest that these roles – and the power and bravery and other virtues associated with them – are the exclusive or particular preserve of men. Sexist terminology often takes the male as norm, the female as derivation or deviation, and men have long considered themselves the quintessential type: Joe Public as “modern man”, putting in man-hours with his manpower.

This led to a good discussion in the comments about (among other things) gender-neutral words for postman. There’s more terminology here – and difficulty – than I first supposed!

My latest post is “Use ‘bloody’? Not Pygmalion likely!” This picks up on a piece the Virtual Linguist wrote about the controversial language in Shaw’s famous play:

Eliza’s line (“Walk! Not bloody likely.”) caused a scandal, and the word Pygmalion was used for decades afterwards as a jocular substitute expletive, as in the title of this post.

Bloody retains a peculiar power to bother people. Just a few years ago, its use in a tourism campaign in Australia caused a considerable fuss. Michael Quinion reports on his World Wide Words website that the Australian prime minister couldn’t bring himself to speak the offending line (“So where the bloody hell are you?”) on radio, but that the tourism minister had a markedly different attitude: “It’s the great Australian adjective. We all use it, it’s part of our language.” [more]

That’s it for this month. As always, comments in either location are very welcome. You can find the full archive of my Macmillan Dictionary Blog posts here, or by clicking the relevant link in the top right corner of this blog.

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Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o’er
Hill and vale puts out the day—
What do you wonder at, asthore,
What’s away in yonder grey?

Dark the eyes that linger long—
Dream-fed heart, awake, come in,
Warm the hearth and gay the song:
Love with tender words would win.

Fades the eve in dreamy fire,
But the heart of night is lit:
Ancient beauty, old desire,
By the cabin doorway flit.

from Twilight by the Cabin by George William Russell, aka Æ.

You might have wondered at the word asthore. It’s an Irish English term of endearment, an anglicised form of the Irish a stór /ə’st̪oːr/, meaning “my dear” or “my darling” – literally “treasure”, with the Irish vocative particle a.

I love the sound and appearance of a stór. Google Books has examples of it in literary use, but asthore appears to be the more common form. I’ve also come across m’asthore, a mixed-tongue contraction of mo stór, “my treasure”.

What do you wonder at, a stór?

And did you notice how the verses above look like a face in profile, with a strong nose, a weak chin, and the broad brim of a hat?

[P.S. I shared the first verse on Twitter and then on Google+, which I recently joined. Because I haven’t yet decided how best to balance these accounts, I’m sharing it here too.]

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‘Are you leaving your curlers in, Dot, till it starts?’ Eithne Duggan asked her friend.
‘Oh def.,’ Doris O’Beirne said. She wore an assortment of curlers — white pipe-cleaners, metal clips, and pink, plastic rollers. Eithne had just taken hers out and her hair, dyed blonde, stood out, all frizzed and alarming. She reminded Mary of a moulting hen about to attempt flight.

This passage appears in Edna O’Brien’s Irish Revel, from her short story collection The Love Object (1968). I like her list of curlers and the unsparing description of Eithne’s hair, but I’m quoting it here because it contains a curious abbreviation — def. for definitely — that I don’t remember seeing in written dialogue before.

Nowadays, definitely is often abbreviated as defo by teens and 20-/30-somethings. My younger sister has introduced me to several novel clippings she and her peers use, and which are an ongoing source of familial amusement and interest. Some of what follows I owe to her; others I came across elsewhere. Some are old, some new.

Besides defo there is hilar (hilarious), wev(s) (whatever), obvs and obvo (obviously), morto (mortifying), fabbo (fabulous), abso (absolutely), natch (naturally), /kaʒ/ (casual), dodge (dodgy), and tradge (tragic) — which through semantic inflation can be used to refer to pretty much anything mildly regrettable. The exaggeration is often deliberate, and lends the utterance an ironic or tongue-in-cheek quality.

A ledge (legend) is someone worthy of praise or appreciation. Legend has become flattened much as awesome and epic have, by repeated association with people and things and events that are not, in the traditional sense, legendary, awesome or epic. This is totes (also tots: totally) natural.

Ledge sometimes takes the -bag suffix — or perhaps it’s what Arnold Zwicky calls a libfix — to become ledgebag, a popular Irish English slang term that means the same as legend. Indeed, with coinages such as ridebag and hoebag following the pejorative dirtbag, scumbag, slimebag and douchebag, -bag might be worth a post of its own.

In the last 10 minutes I've seen the following words in my timeline: ledgebag, ridebag, hoebag. I love you, The Irish Twitter.—
  (@gaelick) January 15, 2012

(Twitter’s a good place to search for words like this and see how they’re being used.)

The recurring -s and -o endings are common in slang and nicknames, acting as markers of informality. Others I heard or saw recently include awks (awkward), rubbs (rubbish), blates (blatantly), and adorbs (adorable). My brother said he saw tots unbo on Facebook, meaning totally unbelievable.

Some of you may be nodding your heads in sombre agreement.

I imagine the particular form these words take reflects the influence of instant and text messaging and other forms of electronic discourse that motivate speed and concision. They’re not the kind of words you’d use in a formal job application, but they are fast and efficient, and language loves a shortcut.

They also identify their users as members of a tribe, serving as implicit signals that one is a student, a young person (or young at heart), or someone who doesn’t take themself too seriously.

Abrevs are like totes adorbs.—
Emily (@emi_kat_sween) January 12, 2012

Young people get a lot of flak for their language. To older generations and traditionalists it can seem lazy, vulgar, or degraded; they may be disturbed and alienated by it. But youth is a time for rebellion from, and reinvention of, the world being inherited, and this is as true of linguistic expression as it is of any other behavioural domain.

Slang, as Eric Partridge wrote, is the quintessence of colloquial speech, “determined by convenience and fancy”. It lets people experiment with language at their ease and pleasure, playing with it as they would play with paint or putty, sharing new shapes as though it were Lego. You don’t have to be a creative writer to be creative with language.

What do you think: are these clippings tradge, cutesy, faddish and ridic, totes adorbs, or obvo delish and amaze? (Yes: amaze is being used as an adjective now; don’t get me started on amazeballs.) Do you use any of them? Where have you heard or seen them, and which ones have I missed?

Updates:

I’ve been reminded of a few on Twitter, such as cajj /kaʒ/ (casual), ridic (ridiculous) and delish (delicious), and have edited them into the post. More may follow. A particularly inventive one comes from Sue Walder, whose daughter has turned CBA (= “can’t be arsed”) into ceebs. Sue says it’s catching on in her house.

A few more: @SamHawkins mentions jel for jealous; Andrew Innes reports awes for awesome; and an unnamed party says she saw ROFLSHVUAKOMAIL (Rolling On Floor Laughing So Hard Voldemort Uses Avada Kedavra On Me And I Live), which isn’t like the others, but (a) the comments touch on ROFL and co., and (b) it amused/scared me.

Lane Greene at Johnson follows up with “Slang: The abbrevs are my plezh“. He adds a few more to the collection and addresses something I’ve wondered about before: that some of these words cluster around certain sounds, such as the dʒ (“dzh”) in ledge, dodge, and tradge. Be sure to read his post to find out what he makes of it all.

Nancy Friedman, via email, reminds me about ridonk: a shortening of ridonkulous, from ridiculous; while Kevin Sullivan offers gorge for gorgeous, though unlike me he finds it “[h]ard to get past negative connotations of the word ‘to gorge’”.

Andrew Sullivan joins in the discussion at his Daily Beast blog The Dish, quoting Lane Greene and me on these “totes cray-cray abbrevs” and then sharing readers’ comments, including one that mentions claymaish for claymation, quoted in the TV show Parks and Recreation.

Coudal Partners have also picked up on this: Abrevs are like totes adorbs.

Lane Greene muses further on the phonetic aspects of these slang abbreviations, proposing that young people have “noticed that letters like ‘t’ and ‘s’ undergo weird sound changes when followed by certain sounds”, and that “[c]utting those words off at those mutated sounds is fun.”

I love this one. Nancy Friedman, in a post at Fritinancy on the word uppertendom, reports that “‘sucesh’ was a popular abbreviation for ‘secessionist’ before the [US] Civil War”. Apparently, sesesh and secesh were also used. Nancy has also written about Nutrish, a brand of dog food that’s “right in step with the vogue for truncations”.

The Dogmic blog adds a few more, from the writer’s brother: mensh for mention, exclo for exclamation mark, susplain (“not even an abbreviation of explain, just a bastardization”), and several Chicago street names.

Lauren Beukes’s cyberpunk novel Moxyland has arb for arbitrary: “You’d be amazed at what compelling viewing even the most arb of daily interactions can make…”

I’ve been seeing unforch used as an abbreviation for unfortunately. You can search Twitter for examples.

On Twitter, Carol Braun says her students in NYC “had a fad for saying ‘hundo’, short for ‘hundred’ and used to express some kind of approval”; while Rollo Romig has brought to my attention this exchange in The Lost Weekend (1945):

“Don’t be ridic.”

“Gloria, please, why imperil our friendship with these loathsome abbreviations?”

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Till (= until) has an extra sense in Irish English that means something like “in order that” or “so that [someone] can…”. A doting relative, upon meeting you after a long absence, might say “Come here till I see you”, which means “Come closer so that I can look at you properly”.

Raymond Hickey, in his essay Southern Irish English, gives the example “Come here till I tell you.” This common expression can invite a listener who is within earshot to move physically closer, but it doesn’t always: it can also serve simply to announce an item of discourse, to prepare an audience’s ears for something of interest or significance, e.g.:

Come here till I tell you what happened this morning.

Used this way, Come here till I tell you is like a longer version of Old English Hwæt! (Hark!, Lo!, Listen!, etc.; literally What!), signalling the beginning of a story, albeit usually shorter than Beowulf. Some speakers run “Come here till” together so it sounds like “C’meertle”.

T. P. Dolan has a nice entry in his Dictionary of Hiberno-English, in which he says till reflects the wider meaning of go /gʌ/ — the corresponding conjunction in Irish — and the idiom behaves “as if it were an adverbial clause of purpose”.

You can see how it works in the literary examples he provides:

Where is he till I murder him? (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Come here till I embrace you. (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

Tell me who’s to blame will yeh til I tear his friggin’ head off. (Billy Roche, A Handful of Stars)

Come here till I comb your hair. (Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes)

And a few more from Google Books:

“You killed my brother,” said the giant; “come here, till I make a garter of your body.” (J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands)

“Och, captain, avick! och! och! come here till I eat you!” And she flung her arm round Robinson’s neck, and bestowed a little furious kiss on him. (Charles Reade, It Is Never Too Late to Mend)

Give me yer blissin’ till I go away to push me fortune. (Seumas MacManus, ‘Twas in Dhroll Donegal)

The MacManus line is one of several illustrative examples included in Michael Montgomery’s From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English.

P. W. Joyce reported in 1910 that this till (“in order that”) was used in many parts of Ireland. Certainly it was familiar to me growing up in the west, and I still hear and use it from time to time.

Updates:

Elizabeth McGuane loves the turn of phrase Come here till I tell you, and adds the related Come here to me and Come here to me now till I tell you. Ronan Delaney believes it’s “all down to that full Irish construction Gabh i leigth anseo go… or roughly Goile’nseo go…”

John Byrne says C’mere till I tell you a question is an “old Limerickism”, while Sally Tipper says the post got her thinking about the “northern English use of while to mean till“, as in “I’ll not be back while late”; she can’t vouch for all contexts, so maybe a native can shed light.

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The Irish phrase mar dhea /mɑr’jæ/, /mɑrə’jæ/ “mor ya” is characteristic of Irish English speech. It’s a sceptical interjection used to cast doubt, dissent or derision (or all three) on whatever phrase or clause precedes it. Mar dhea literally means as were it, i.e., as if it were so.*

Sometimes mar dhea is translated as forsooth, but I’m not sure this is helpful. Better to consider it an ironic insertion similar to As if!, Yeah right!, or a sarcastic indeed or supposedly. Bernard Share, in Slanguage, describes it as an “expression of sardonic disbelief or dissent”, while P. W. Joyce says it’s:

a derisive expression of dissent to drive home the untruthfulness of some assertion or supposition or pretence, something like the English ‘forsooth’, but infinitely stronger [English As We Speak It In Ireland]

Mar dhea has been anglicised in many ways, for example moryah, mor-yah, maryah, mara-ya, maryeah, mauryah, maureeyah, muryaa, moy-ah, and moya. It’s a testament to its popularity in Hiberno-English, the diversity of Irish pronunciation, and the difficulty of finding precise orthographic correspondence between the two tongues.

The best way to know a phrase is to see it in use. T. P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers these examples from Kathleen Griffin in Kerry: “She’s a great cook – maryah”; and “Friend, maryeah! Some friend he was!” The first of these implies that she believes, mistakenly, that she’s a great cook.

Boards.ie has further examples, some reinforcing preceding scare quotes, and there are literary examples below. Dolan classifies it as an ironic interjection, close to the OED‘s label of interjection “expressing deep scepticism”. The OED includes it under the headword moya, which is the spelling Joyce uses in Ulysses:

—Well, says John Wyse. Isn’t that what we’re told. Love your neighbour.
—That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love, moya! He’s a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.

and in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, in Dubliners:

And the men used to go in on Sunday morning before the houses were open to buy a waistcoat or a trousers — moya! But Tricky Dicky’s little old father always had a tricky little black bottle up in a corner. Do you mind now?**

Finnegans Wake contains moravar, which seems to blend mar bh’ea – an older version of mar dhea – with moreover. (Thanks to @bisted for the tip.) Flann O’Brien preferred to spell it muryaa:

This’ll make you laugh. He come up every now and again to the digs to see how I was muryaa . . . [The Hair of the Dogma]

But Jonas was a prophet, wasn’t he? – He was a prophet who disgraced himself. He disobeyed God’s orders because, muryaa, he knew better. That’s why he was heaved into the sea. [The Dalkey Archive]

The phrase can also stand alone in dialogue, as in Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on our Skin:

‘Where were you yesterday anyway?’
‘I was sick.’
‘Mauryah.’
‘It’s true.’

One journalist said the expression “has the same strength as humbug multiplied say ten thousand times”. This may be a slight exaggeration, but conveying total scepticism of posturing and fakery is one of its main functions, and this again is to the fore in George Fitzmaurice’s The Moonlighter:

She had me once surely, the day she came over the strap, a corner of her bib in one eye, she weeping, moryah! and the other little eye dancing and lepping inside in her head.

I grew up hearing mar dhea in the mid-west, where it’s in no immediate danger of disappearing. On Twitter, several people from around Ireland told me they inherited or heard it from their parents or other relatives. I think it’s holding its own in colloquial Irish English, signalling anything from gentle doubt to biting sarcasm, but it’s probably used less by younger generations, for whom As if! and similar (TV?-)imported expressions serve a similar purpose.

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40 shades of green, mar dhea, in Connemara, Galway

Síle Nic Chonaonaigh, based in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht in Connemara, hears it at least as much in English as in Irish. It appears in the Irish Times in both Irish and English texts, variously spelled. Its obscurity to people unfamiliar with Irish or Irish English means it fits what Cathy called “keeping secrets” mode: “Sentence for public consumption, undercut by two words for own group.”

Natalie told me about mockaya, a related “term of disparagement for bad fakery”. It may be a portmanteau of mar dhea and mock, and her examples (“A mockaya Irish pub”; “Sure that house isn’t old, tis all only mockaya“) show it to be more syntactically embedded than mar dhea, which tends to appear postpositionally and often separated by punctuation.

I was overdue a post on Hiberno-English, but what prompted this one specifically was a line I read recently in Maura Treacy’s “An Old Story”, from her collection Sixpence in her Shoe, published by Poolbeg Press in 1977. I used it as the last line in a bookmash a couple of months ago.

The full passage is worth quoting:

“You’re the one to talk about strangers! Every bucko from hell to Bethlehem slouching up to the door in the dark winter nights. Or whistling behind the hedge for you to come out. And your ladyship, of course . . . hah!” The old woman lifted her hands, held them fatalistically in the air, then brought them back to rest again. “Hah!” she repeated, as if her daughter’s behaviour might have been predicted from the beginning of time. “Out with her on the minute, no questions asked, go a bit of the road with everyone. And then as soon as the bright evenings were in and they saw the shape you were taking, away with them over the hills. Off to re-join the regiment, moryah. And it’s farewell to thee, my bonny wee lass.”

.

[more posts on Irish English]

* Some sources include mar bh’ea(dh) (from mar bhadh eadh), mar dh’eadh or mar-sheadh; these appear to be older forms.

** mind here means remember; it’s an old sense of the word.

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Look away now if curse words bother you.

Feck is a popular minced oath in Ireland, occupying ground between the ultra-mild expletive flip and the often taboo (but also popular) fuck. It’s strongly associated with Irish speech, and serves a broad range of linguistic purposes that I’ll address briefly in this post.

The most familiar modern use of feck is as a euphemistic substitute for fuck, as in the phrases Feck!, Feck off!, feck it, feck-all, fecker, feck(ed) up, fair fecks (kudos), (for) feck(‘s) sake, fecked (exhausted, ruined, in a bad situation), and the intensifier feckin’ or fecking, which often collocates with hell, eejit, gobshite or some such insult.

Here are a few literary examples:

I’m so feckin’ hungry I could eat that feckin’ horse. (Amanda Whittington, Ladies’ Day)

Feck off Greeley or I’ll call the Guards and have you deported. (Peter Murphy, Lagan Love)

Oh thank Christ the fecker’s over. A pile of fecking shite. (Martin McDonagh, The Cripple of Inishmaan)

Ah Johnnypateen, will you feck off home for yourself? (same)

I went on clinging to the wall until old Fanning appeared at his front window and made feck-off gestures of great savagery. (Hugh Leonard, Out After Dark)

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poster by Fergus O’Neill at GrandGrand.ie

Feck and fuck do not overlap entirely. Feck is family-friendly, even according to advertising standards authorities (though not always). As expletives go, it has a playful, unserious feel. People who are genuinely furious – as opposed to merely annoyed – or who want to be properly abusive, tend not to use feck: it just isn’t forceful enough.

There are significant differences between feck and fuck aside from their relative strengths as curses. For one thing, feck doesn’t have sexual uses or connotations. To feck something in Hiberno-English generally means to steal it (see below) or to throw it, often impatiently or casually: she fecked the orange peel out the car window.

Decked out in all his Dublin gear he stomped up the street suffering what may have been his first real taste of what defeat can do [to] a passionate soul. Off came the scarf and he fecked it into a garden. [via]

The word got a boost from its recurrent use in the 1990s TV comedy Father Ted, in which Father Jack shouts “Feck off!” regularly enough to make it a catchphrase. Here’s Pauline McLynn, playing Mrs Doyle, mouthing off to Dermot Morgan’s eponymous priest about the “fierce” language in a novel she read:

Searching Twitter for feck, fecker, fecked and so on shows how actively and naturally the word is used. Its tonal range is likewise impressive: fecker, for instance, can suggest affection or admiration as well as indicating dismissal or derision, while feck off meaning “depart” needn’t have negative implications: Will we feck off home at this stage?

Feck appears quite frequently in Irish newspapers, sometimes in reported speech:

“I haven’t an effin’ clue what he’s talking about,” the councillor whispers to the journalists. “But, feck it, it sounds absolutely brilliant!” (Lorna Siggins, Irish Times)

When we attack all out, with no feck-acting, football becomes a great game again. (Billy Keane, Irish Independent)

Feck also functions as a noun, dating from at least the 15th century. Apparently it comes from a Scottish variant of effect, so it’s a good example of aphesis (also aphaeresis): the loss of an initial sound in a word. Here are the three senses included in the OED:

1. The greater or better part; a great quantity [Robert Burns: "I hae been a devil the feck o' my life"; Robert Louis Stevenson: "He had a feck o' books wi' him"].

2. The purpose, the intended result; the point (of a statement, etc.).

3. Efficacy, efficiency, value.  Feckful: efficient

(Feckless derives from the last of these. Fek is Esperanto for shit, but this is coincidental and incidental.)

In English As We Speak It In Ireland, P. W. Joyce says feck (or fack) is a spade, “from the very old Irish word fec,” while Bernard Share’s Slanguage says feck can mean “sight, spectacle” (from Irish feic “see”, same pronunciation) and is the name of a card game and an implement used in the game of pitch and toss. Terence Dolan also reports on this.

Feck as a verb once meant “keep a look out”, maybe from Irish feic. And then there is the Irish slang feck “steal, take”, which the Chambers Dictionary of Slang says may originate in Old English feccan “to fetch, gain, take”, or German fegen “to plunder”. We see this usage in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Because they had fecked cash out of the rector’s room.

So where does the curse, the not-quite-rude word, come from? It’s commonly assumed to stem from its coarser cousin fuck, the simple vowel change undercutting its power and making it more suitable for public expression. But Julian Walker, an educator at the British Library, offers a more roundabout route:

“In faith” becomes the improbable “in faith’s kin” shortened to “i’fackins”, which gradually shrinks to “fac” and “feck” . . .

The Irish writer Pádraig Ó Méalóid cites a couple of sources that point to the same etymological path, so he also doesn’t subscribe to the “euphemistic deformation theory” that feck as a euphemism came about by mimesis of fuck: “What we have instead is a euphemistic meaning layered on top of a much older existing expression”.

Feck me, but feck evidently has a feck-load of meanings, uses, and origins. More are welcome, as are your opinions and reports on how you say or hear or feel about the word.

Updates:

More discussion of feck at Language Hat, and of feckless at Fritinancy.

If you were curious about the “Feck Off Rain” ad described in the ASAI link above, here it is. The wording itself was fine, but combined with the chocolate flake V-sign it proved too strong. Many thanks to Niamh for the photo, which she took on the Galway–Tuam road in May 2011.

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Niamh has spotted another ad campaign using feck in a slogan: takeaway delivery service Just-Eat.ie’s “Feck washing up”, seen on the billboard below. She grabbed the photo from a moving bus and sent it my way. Thanks, Niamh!

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[more posts on Hiberno-English]

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The word hame is usually found in the plural: hames are two curved wooden or metal pieces forming part of the collar of a draught animal’s harness; they fit around the neck and the traces are fastened to them. (A draught/draft animal is one used for muscular work, typically pulling – i.e., drawing – a cart, plough, or other heavy load.)

In Ireland, though, hames has been repurposed in the informal idiom make a hames of, meaning make a mess or a hash of. It implies the mess has resulted from carelessness, clumsiness, or ineptitude: a sports player who misses an easy opportunity, or a baker who forgets the leavening agent, can be said to have made a hames of it.

Hames is sometimes preceded by a modifying or intensifying term: you could make a right hames, a fierce hames, an almighty hames, an awful hames, or a complete and total hames of a task. Browsing Google Books we find a variety of things being made a hames of: jobs, plays, heists, documents, Bibles, sums, relationships, Socialism:

This was a good start: my first salaried job and I was making a hames of it. (Robert E. Tangney, Other Days Around Me)

Why should a carefully-prepared document be made a hames of by a typographically illiterate user who has set to display as 44pt Punk Bold in diagonal purple and green stripes? (TEX Users Group, Vol. 16, 1995)

Often it’s just it that appears at the end of the phrase, in which case the expression refers to something made obvious by the context:

“Expressed at its simplest, it’s ‘You can’t let the Irish run the country, sure they’d make a hames of it.’” (David McKittrick, Endgame: The search for peace in Northern Ireland)

“How did I make a hames of your play?” asked F. J. “You made a hames of it at that particular line when Donal says… (Garry O’Connor, Sean O’Casey: A Life)

Make a hames of is very much an Irish expression. Its meagre results in Google’s vast books corpus, and its total absence from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (and the Historical one), testify to the idiom’s limited province. But it’s in active use here. I heard it regularly growing up, and still do occasionally. I like how it sounds.

A search on the Irish Times website reveals several recent instances of its use from politicians, spokepersons, and journalists themselves, including the memorable line: “But why is the young Irish male making such a hames of the hip-hop hug?” It even shows up in headlines. More informal examples may be found in the Boards.ie forums.

The OED says hame is from Middle Dutch (Dutch haam) corresponding to Middle High German ham(e) = fishing rod, of unknown origin. Why it was incorporated into the phrase make of hames of is uncertain: maybe because it’s difficult to put hames on the right way. Michael Quinion says his “carriage-driving consultant tells me it’s all too easy to put the hames on a horse the wrong way up, thus making a complete mess of things”. Terence Dolan tentatively supports this etymology.

Chambers Slang Dictionary mentions hame and haym as variants of haim (etymology unknown), jazz lingo for “a job other than in the music business; . . . a job, usually tedious or unpleasant”, but there’s no obvious connection with the hames discussed above. I could try to forge one speculatively, but I would probably make a hames of it.

[more posts on Hiberno-English]

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Irish Folk Furniture is a stop-motion documentary, 8½ minutes long, that won an award for animation at the Sundance Film Festival last month. Director Tony Donoghue thought it might be too specialist to appeal widely, but it has charmed its way around the festival circuit. I recommend it warmly.

The film celebrates the tradition and use of farmhouse furniture in Ireland, with 16 items restored to a functional state. This is furniture not usually seen as beautiful – or starring in a film – but whose appeal lies in its very ordinariness and utility, and in the history it amasses over generations of use.

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It’s a quiet gem in both form and content: as if Jan Švankmajer had rambled down a boreen in Tipperary. Dressers and flour bins wheel around the countryside while their owners chat away. The film is gently funny, beautifully shot, and features some lovely rural Irish accents and syntax, e.g. done as preterite in “we done a good bit on ’em”.

I wanted to link to the original on Donoghue’s YouTube page, but that video has since been set to private, so here it is from another page:

Edit: I’ve removed the video after seeing a comment on YouTube from Tony Donoghue saying his film was only meant to be online for the two weeks of Sundance, and that its continued online presence may undermine its film festival run.

If it reappears legitimately, I’ll reinstate it here.

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Story Bud? is a fun video by Jenny Keogh that’s doing the rounds. It’s a rapid-fire two-minute clip of Dublin slang and colloquial expressions. They’re not all peculiar to Dublin – some are heard around Ireland or in other countries – but they all have currency in Irish English speech and offer a fine flavour of Dublin’s vernacular.

Certain lines may be hard to decipher, especially for non-Irish people. The accents are quite strong, and some of the expressions are strange if you haven’t heard them before. So I’ve typed them out below, with notes, and numbered them for ease of reference. (The video itself also supplies occasional glosses.)

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1. Come here till I tell ya. [See my post on this Irish use of till.]

2. I was down with yer man. You know yer man.

3. I met her gettin’ off the Daniel Day. [...Lewis = Luas, Dublin’s light rail system.]

4. She’d an awful puss on her. [Puss = pout or frown; discussed briefly in my post on cnáimhseáil.]

5. Nearly had a canary. [Had a fit, metaphorically.]

6. She lost the rag. [She lost her temper.]

7. Ah yer man threw the head. [= lost the head, i.e., lost his temper.]

8. Me nerves were shot.

9. Me head is melted.

10. She’s a miserable article. [This article can be used with affection or derogation.]

11. Sure her nerves are at her. She’s a very soft person.

12. Sure this is it. [I strongly agree.]

13. I wouldn’t mind, she’s a skinny malink.

14. Go (a)way out o’ that. [Expression of surprise. Similar to Shut up, Would you don't be talkin', and Would you stop (see 56–57).]

15. Story bud? [Short for What's the story, buddy? = What's going on? / What's the news?]

16. There’s head-the-ball. [T. P. Dolan defines this as “a crazy, happy-go-lucky sort of person”.]

17. Whose gaff are we meetin’ at?

18. What’s the craic? [=15]

19. Any scandal? [Used generically of gossip or news.]

20. Are ya goin’ for a jar?

21. I’m Lee Marvin out (of) me nogger. [Rhyming slang for starvin' "very hungry", though starving/starved can also mean cold or freezing.]

22. Me belly thinks me throat is cut. [An old phrase. It appears in P. W. Joyce's English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910).]

23. You’re what?

24. I’m starvin’.

25. Is that cooker on?

26. Ravenous I am.

27. D’ya want a package o’ crips? [Playful variation on packet of crisps.]

28. The head on him and the price o’ turnips.

29. He’s an awful bleedin’ chancer. [Crafty person, risk-taker, rogue.]

30. (I’m) tellin’ ya, I wouldn’t be with him, he’d only scourge ya. [He would torment or plague you (sometimes refers to sex).]

31. I’m as sick as the plane to Lourdes.

32. Banjoed. [Not to be confused with banjaxed “broken, ruined”.]

33. I was in tatters. [Very hungover.]

34. Absolutely knackered. [Exhausted.]

35. I nearly broke me snot. [Tripped.]

36. I was only morto. [Mortified. See my post on faddish clippings.]

37. Scarleh for yeh. [Scarlet, i.e., blushing.]

38. Scarlet for yer ma. [I'm embarrassed on behalf of your mother.]

39. Scarlet for me life.

40. Don’t worry – you’ll be grand. [Grand in Ireland usually means fine, all right – nothing to do with size or impressiveness.]

41. Have you got your ecker done? [Ecker = (homework) exercises.]

42. What?

43. You’re thinkin’? Mind you don’t hurt your head. [Said to someone who's slow with an answer and stalls by saying "I'm thinking." Jenny tells me this is normally said by an older person to a younger one.]

44. That’s savage.

45. That’s whopper.

46. That’s deadly.

47. He was only massive. [Good-looking, or attractive to the speaker.]

48. State of her.

49. The cut o’ yer one.

50. The hack o’ him.

51. I’m only messin’ with yeh.

52. Relax the khaks.

53. I will in me eye. [Also: I will in my hole/hoop/arse, etc. It's an emphatic I won't.]

54. What planet is she on?

55. If you don’t stop yer messin’, there’ll be wigs on the green. [An old expression referring to a brawl.]

56. Ah would ya stop. [Don't stop, i.e., keep talking.]

57. Stop the lights. [Expression of surprise or consternation. Catchphrase from a 1970s radio show, I think Quicksilver, an old Irish TV quiz show.]

58. No way.

59. Are you for real? [= Are you serious?]

60. Get the boat.

61. Janey Mac! [Euphemistic form of Jesus!]

62. Face was manky. [Manky = dirty, disgusting.]

63. Mouldy.

64. It’s an awful kip. [Untidy or unsavoury place; less commonly, a brothel.]

65. Says I to her, says she to me.

66. Did you see the thing anywhere, I’m lookin’ for it, I need it for the yoke.

67. The thingummybob.

68. That yoke is banjaxed. [That thing is broken.]

69. You’re what?

70. Keep sketch, will ya? [Keep a lookout.]

71. Peg it, he’s chasin’ ya. [Peg it = Leg it, i.e., run.]

72. Give us a shot o’ that. [Let me have a go/turn.]

73. You’re wreckin’ me buzz. [You're destroying my pleasure/peace of mind.]

74. Ah don’t be so scabby. [Stingy, mean.]

75. Sure he’d take the eye out of yer head and come back for the eyelashes.

76. All you have is your character. [All you have is your reputation, your good name. So be good.]

77. Jaypers! [Another minced oath.]

*

A few lines gave me trouble until Jenny Keogh, the director, helped me out. If I’ve erred with any transcriptions or interpretations, corrections are welcome – as are general comments. Jenny says she’s planning several more videos celebrating Irish slang and phrases. Deadly buzz!

[more posts on Hiberno-English]

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Regular commenter John Cowan has a question on non-standard phrases, and hopes Sentence first readers can shed some light on it:

I’d like some information from native speakers of Hiberno-English, the English variety spoken in Ireland (all counties). I figure this is a good community to ask.

Consider these three kinds of possessives applied to body parts. None of them are part of Standard English, but they are all used in other languages and possibly in spoken Hiberno-English too.

1) The head of him is very large.
2) The head on him is very large.
3) The head to him is very large.

It would be extremely helpful to me if you could say which of these (if any) you would use, and when, and when (if ever) you hear them spoken by others. Comments like “Sure, I say that all the time” and “Not me, but people around me say it often” or “My grandmother used to say that” or “Not around here, but I believe it’s said in the North|South|East|West” would be even more helpful.

If it helps, substitute something else for the “is very large” part; that doesn’t matter. Any other body part would work too.

Speakers of other varieties, if you yourself regularly use any of these kinds of possessives, please tell me.

If you don’t want to go on record with this, private mail to cowan@ccil.org works for me.

*

My answer (from the mid-west of Ireland): I don’t think I’ve ever used or heard the construction in (3) (“The head to him…”). I hear those in (1) and (2) used informally quite often in contexts like:

A) The head of/on him (and the price of turnips/cabbage).

B) The face of/on that lad.

C) The puss of/on yer one. [puss = mouth, esp. sulking; one often pronounced wan, either naturally or affectedly]

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Clik here to view.As well as hearing them, I’ve also used these lines (or versions of them), though I leave out the vegetable analogies. Where of is used, it’s typically unstressed and lacking the /v/ sound: The head o’ yer man. It’s more usually on in (C), for me.

Most are standalone expressions, I think. I’ve never heard any of them used before a phrase like “is very large”. (If I were to say that at all, I’d likely use standard syntax: His head is very large.)

Regarding meaning: In (A), The head on/of X = The state of X, drawing attention to X’s appearance for an unspecified reason, probably negative (e.g., dishevelled or strikingly unusual) – or it can suggest someone is self-important, as in this video of Dublin slang. Like many Irish insults, the disparagement does not preclude affection.

(B) implies a scowl or other sour expression. There’s a fair chance the speaker doesn’t feel the scowler’s attitude is justified. The puss in (C) implies a sulking expression, often a child’s; see my post on cnáimhseáil for a note on usage and etymology.

Then there are more obviously figurative expressions such as “The cheek of him” and “The neck of/on that lad”, the latter indicating brazenness. But since these don’t refer to actual body parts, they’re probably irrelevant. Maybe that goes for (C) too.

I’m probably overlooking a lot here, and your experience of these constructions may be quite different to mine – or you might be able to confirm what I’ve written. Can you help John out?

[Image: Kohlrabi, Leeks, Turnips lithograph by Anton Seder, via Wikimedia Commons]

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Alice Taylor’s Quench the Lamp is a warm and funny memoir of her childhood in rural Cork in the 1940s, full of anecdotes and observations on farm activities, family dramas, eccentric neighbours, and Irish life before and after electrification.

A chapter on thrift and the “art of making do” shows how objects’ versatility was engineered and enhanced. Pot lids warmed beds, goose wings dusted cobwebs, turf dust was deployed when the cat did “what he must where he shouldn’t”. Bags and boxes were strategically repurposed once emptied of their original cargo.

Newspaper served a multitude of roles, some of them still current even in urban lifestyles:

Our newspaper, the Cork Examiner, was a multi-purpose item. It cleaned and polished windows and it covered bare timber floors before the first lino or tarpaulin went down, thus providing underlay and insulation. Placed in layers on top of wire bed-springs, it eased the wear on the horsehair mattress; cut into the right shape, it became insoles in heavy leather boots and shoes and, later, in wellingtons when they became part of our lives. Even though it could never be described as baby soft, it was the forerunner of the multi-million-pound industry that subsequently provided soft solutions in the toilet-paper business. Rolled into balls it was a firelight, its effectiveness improved by a sprinkling of paraffin oil. Ned [a local shop owner] shaped it into funnels and filled it with sweets to make a tóimhsín, as he called it. At home it lined drawers and was considered mothproof and, when nothing else was available, it was used as a dustpan. One of our more industrious neighbours regularly covered her potato stalks with newspaper at night and this protected them from frost.

Taylor says those who excelled in the frugal art ran the risk of being considered thrifty to a fault – it would be said of them that they “could live under a hen”. Or you might say someone “could live in your ear and rent out the other one without you knowing it”.

A tóimhsín or tomhaisín /’t̪oːʃiːn/, by the way, is Irish for a small measure or amount, or in this case a cone-shaped paper bag or poke, often used for holding sweets. It comes from tomhais “measure, weigh”, and is sometimes anglicised as tosheen, to-sheen, or toisheen.

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Remember Story Bud?, the video of Irish slang and colloquialisms I shared here in February? Director Jenny Keogh has filmed a second clip, How’s About Ye?, in the same style, and it’s great fun altogether.

There are on-screen glosses for the phrases, but because the delivery and editing are rapid-fire – and some of the accents are strong – I’ve added Jenny’s transcript below, with a few tweaks.

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*

In related news, Jenny is working on a feature-length film comprising more of these videos along with expert interviews and other footage. She’s holding “Phrase Donor Clinics” around Ireland to collect phrases from the public to use in the film.

Jenny is crowdfunding this on Fund it, an Irish Kickstarter-type website, so if you’d like to support this very worthy project, you can. There’s two weeks left to contribute; pledges from €15 up earn a reward, and if funding falls short, you won’t be charged. You can find out more at JennyKeogh.com and on the Story Bud? Facebook page.

*

How’s About Ye?

1. Well, what about ye? [Greeting.]

2. Alright there Bosco? [Greeting. (Bosco is a famous children’s TV puppet from the 1980s in Ireland.)]

3. What’s goin’ on yerself? [How are you?]

4. Y’awright Sham? [Alright, friend?]

5. How’s about you? [Greeting.]

6. Hello, well? [Greeting.]

7. Langer, where you goin’ with that? [Fella, what are you doing?]

8. Are yih Musha or are yih from Nenagh? [Are you from Thurles or Nenagh?]

9. Well Horse? [Greeting.]

10. How’s she cuttin’? [How are you?]

11. What part of the parish are you from? [You’re not from around here?]

12. A guard wouldn’t ask me that. [Don’t be so nosy. Guard = Garda (Síochána), literally "guardian(s) of the peace", i.e., police officer.]

13. The feens were reekin’ cos they got caught by the shades. [The lads were annoyed because they got caught by the police.]

14. You’re wha’?

15. I didn’t do nothin’. [I did nothing.]

16. Say nothin’ for a while and then say nothin’ at all. [Say nothing.]

17. There was ructions around the Square last night. [There was trouble around the main square of the town last night.]

18. Chalk it down boy, we were haunted. [For sure, we were really lucky (narrow escape).]

19. You’re an awful yap. [You’re a loudmouth/complainer.]

20. I didn’t say anythin’, so I didn’t. [I said nothing.]

21. Say nothin’ to no one about nothin’ and keep sayin’ it. [Tell no one at all.]

22. C’mere you hai. [Hey you.]

23. Oh for fluck’s sake. [Instead of fuck's.]

24. Have a titter of wit. [Have some sense.]

25. I will yeah. [I won’t.]

26. He’s thick enough for two of them. [He’s stupid.]

27. Thick as a double ditch, that one. [She’s stupid.]

28. She’s pure dry, that one. [She’s boring/dull.]

29. He’s as raw as ropes. [He’s ignorant/simple.]

30. He’s a face on him like a Lurgan spade. [A typically Northern Irish expression also spoken as: face as long as a Lurgan spade, meaning to look miserable or long-faced. One theory about its origin is that a Lurgan spade was an under-paid workman digging what is now the Lurgan Park lake. Another theory is that it's a translation from the Irish lorga spád, meaning the shaft/shin of a spade.]

31. She’s a head on her like Methuselah’s goat. [She’s old looking. See my recent post on the Irish dialectal construction the head on him.]

32. Lamp the gatch on him. [Look at the walk on him.]

33. Yeh wha’?

34. You’re a liúdramán. [You’re an idiot/lazy person. I’ll have a separate post on this mighty word.]

35. He’s a hump on him like an ol’ bow saw. [He has a humped back.]

36. She’s an awful snear. [She’s snide/not to be trusted.]

37. She’s a dirty old clart. [She’s a slob/rude.]

38. Do you like hospital food? [A threat of violence.]

39. You couldn’t be up to her. [She’s hard to handle/wouldn’t be able for her.]

40. Get ’em out. [Be off.]

41. That weather would have you foundered. [It’s very cold.]

42. Raining? ‘Twas millin’ out o’  the heavens. [Very heavy rain.]

43. It’s horrid warm, so it is. [Very warm weather.]

44. It won’t be long now till after a while. [It will be soon.]

45. Would ye take a drop of tea in your hand? [A quick cup of tea.]

46. Put on the purdies. [Start boiling the potatoes.]

47. Hang on there we’ll get the deaths in the Star. [Newspaper for the death notices.]

48. Boys. Are we goin’ gattin’? [Are we going drinking alcohol?]

49. I got steamed in Shoots. [I got drunk in the well-known pub in the town.]

50. I had too much Dwans dwinks dwank. [Dwans was a brewery in Thurles and that was a phrase used.]

51. I nearly cowped up them stairs. [I nearly fell up the stairs.]

52. Oh, my face is on fire with the shame of me. [I’m embarrassed.]

53. I’m like a poisoned pup. [I’m very hungover.]

54. Yeh langer boy. [You fool.]

55. Wha’?

56. The fella has one eye lookin’ at you and one eye lookin’ at himself. [Vain/self-obsessed.]

57. Yeh beaut yeh. [Thanks – you’re brilliant.]

58. Go on, give her the diddie. [Give it welly, i.e., Put effort into it.]

59. Oh aye. [Oh yes.]

60. I didn’t know she was dead until I saw it in the Star.

61. Ah the poor craythur. [The poor person (said with affection/irony). From Irish créatúr.]

62. Boys. I’m batin’ on. [i.e., beating. I’m going home.]

63. No bother.

64. Take her handy. [Take care.]

65. Get outa that garden. [You’re talking rubbish/I don’t believe you.]

[more Hiberno-English posts]

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In Ireland, to be bulling means to be angry – typically in a visible and maybe voluble way, and sometimes with comical connotations.¹ I used to hear it now and then in my childhood and teens, but haven’t come across it much in recent years. Maybe raging has eaten into its niche.

So I enjoyed this reminder in Declan Hughes’s crime novel All the Dead Voices (see my old bookmash):

‘And he was like, we need a new way to operate, we can’t keep taking our rivals out, we can’t keep doing things the old way. The Lamp Comerford way. Charlie said Lamp was bulling when he heard this, he felt he was being sidelined.’

You might assume the word comes from the noun bull and the animal’s reputation for bad-tempered stampedes. This may have reinforced the usage, but I think its origin is the Irish word buile “madness, frenzy”. To be ar buile /ər ’bwɪlʲə/ (roughly “er bwill-ih”) is to be in a rage or fury, a deargbuile /’dʒærəg,bwɪlʲə/ is literally a red rage (cf. red mist), and a fear buile /’fʲær ’bwɪlʲə/ is a madman.²

In Hiberno-English the expression bulling to do something is similar to the English mad to do something, i.e., very eager. If someone is bulling to go to the match, it implies an overwhelming desire to go to the match, without necessarily any anger or desperation.

My Irish-English dictionary has ar buile chun rud a dhéanamh, translated as “crazy to do something”, but I didn’t know this idiom and found the gloss ambiguous: does it mean extremely eager (= “mad keen”) or something more unhinged? Enquiries on Twitter were inconclusive, though @ExposieRosie said it suggests frantic rather than keen.

Another open question is how old bulling = angry is. Jonathon Green’s Chambers Slang Dictionary dates the sense to the 2000s, but I know it was used in the 1980s and 1990s, and my father says he remembers it from his (1950s) childhood. It may well be much older than that.

Edit:

John Cowan, in a comment, has reminded me of the traditional Irish song An Poc ar Buile (“The Mad Puck Goat”). Some background here, and a performance from the Chieftains and friends below:

[archive of Hiberno-English posts]

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¹ I know bulling has other meanings, but I’m ignoring most of them here.

² Phonetic renderings are approximate, and suggestions are welcome.

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I have a guest post up at A Thing About Words, the blog of Merriam-Webster Unabridged, on the curious subject of placeholder words: What sort of yoke is that thingamajig?

Placeholder words, as you’ll probably know or will have guessed from the title, refer to things (or people, places, etc.) whose name is unknown, forgotten, or unnecessary in the context.

After briefly discussing everyday examples such as thing and stuff, I move on to the “elaborate and ever-growing set” whose members include whatchacallit and thingamabob:

Ever-growing in two senses: not only are there more of these words every time I look, but their syllables clump like crystals. Thing produced thingum and thingummy, which grew into thingamabob and thingamajig. And then there’s oojah and oojamaflip, whatsit, veeblefetzer, doodad and doohickey, whatchacallit and whatchamacallit, the infix “-ma” perhaps motivated by symmetry or prosody. Some placeholder words have been around for centuries and boast myriad variations to be reshuffled on a whim and sent tumbling into colloquial conversation.

One of my favourite placeholders is, I think, peculiar to Ireland or at any rate Hiberno-English: yoke. It’s in popular use around Ireland.

[Yoke] can refer to an unspecified object (Give us that yoke) or an indescribable person (You’re an awful yoke). Both are informal, and the latter is gently or affectionately pejorative. You can hear it in this video of Dublin phrases. Yoke can even serve as a root, like thing in the permutations above, yielding words such as yokeamabob, yokeamajig, and thingamayoke. Yokey and yokibus also have some currency. Fun words, for sure, but like attention-grabbing outfits they’re probably best not overused.

For more detail on Hiberno-English yoke (including colourful examples from literature), along with various other placeholder curios such as Philip K. Dick’s kipple, click here for the full yoke.

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The phrasal verb give out has several common senses:

distribute – “she gave out free passes to the gig”

emit – “the machine gave out a distinctive hum”

break down, stop working – “at the end of the marathon her legs gave out”

become used up – “their reserves of patience finally gave out”

declare, make known – “management gave out that it was unsatisfied with productivity levels”

In Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale I read an example of this last sense: “At the moment the Communist Party is giving out that he was off his head.” Had Fleming been Irish, this line would be ambiguous – Ireland has another give out, a common informal usage meaning complain, grumble, moan; or criticise, scold, reprimand, tell off.

I think this give out comes from the Irish tabhair amach, same meaning. It’s intransitive, and often followed by to [a person]. People might give out to someone for some character flaw or oversight, or about politics, the weather, or the state of the roads. Or they might just give out in an unspecific or habitual way.

He always seemed to be in bad humour and was always giving out. (Joe McVeigh, Taking a Stand: Memoir of an Irish Priest)

“If I eat any more turnips I’ll turn bleedin’ yellow.”
“Ah, don’t be always giving out,” said Mother. (Christy Brown, Down All the Days)

Giving out to him the whole time: ‘I’ve hated you for years, you old fecker, so take this.’ (Anne Emery, Obit: A Mystery)

The phrase is sometimes intensified by adding stink, yards, to high heaven, or (less often) the pay:

Afterwards in the car my mother would give out yards to my father for being so generous to his sponging relations. (Sinead Moriarty, Keeping It In the Family)

Of course you prefer your little pet of a daughter who gave out stink to me this morning and wanted me to shift myself and my bed and I in the throes of mortal suffering. (John B. Keane, Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer and other stories)

I heard the mother giving out stink to the father about it the other night; she was doing the old shout-whisper… (Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart)

‘We’re gone fierce boring now. Real suburbanites, I guess. Mowing the lawn and giving out yards about the neighbours.’ (Joseph O’Connor, Two Little Clouds)

For all we know, they give out to high heaven behind closed doors but we’ve no indication of that so we have to presume they are ok with things. (JoeyFantastic on Munsterfans.com forum)

…even if I did have to listen to him giving out the pay about the dangers of the Teddy Boys now inhabiting the place. (Brendan Behan, Confessions of an Irish Rebel)

Bernard Share, in Slanguage, says give out is an abbreviation of give out the hour, and is also seen in the form give off. But I haven’t encountered these much.

Dermot, she said again, say something. Give off to me but don’t stay quiet. (Dermot Healy, The Bend for Home)

You’ll find give out = complain, criticise, etc. in many dictionaries of Irish slang, but it’s not really slang: it’s idiomatic in most or all of the dialects on this island, a regular feature of vernacular Hiberno-English. And it doesn’t end there.

On Twitter recently, Oliver Farry said “people in Kansas and Missouri use ‘give out’ in much the same way as Irish people do”. This was news to me, and I’d be interested to hear more about it – or about its use anywhere else in this “Irish” sense. Including Ireland: I use it myself. But don’t give out to me if I’ve overlooked something important.

Update:

LanguageHat follows up on this and is also interested in the Kansas/Missouri use of the phrase. A few commenters from these States have never heard it, so its distribution is evidently limited.

[Hiberno-English archives]

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Browsing Daniel O’Keeffe’s First Book of Irish Ballads yesterday (Mercier Press, 1955), I came upon this verse in ‘Song from the Backwoods’ by T. D. Sullivan:

And well we know in the cool grey eyes,
When the hard day’s work is o’er,
How soft and sweet are the words that greet
The friends who meet once more;
With ‘Mary machree!’ and ‘My Pat! ’tis he!’
And ‘My own heart night and day!’
Ah, fond old Ireland! dear old Ireland!
Ireland, boys, hurra!

One word might give general/non-Irish readers pause. Machree /mə’kriː/, /mə’xriː/ is an anglicisation of mo chroí, Irish for “my heart”, also spelt mochree and other ways (Scottish Gaelic has mo chridhe). Sometimes vocative a replaces mo: achree or a-chree, from Irish a chroí.

These phrases are used similarly to Hiberno-English asthore and m’asthore (Irish a stór and mo stór “my treasure”, i.e., my dear/darling), and occasionally they appear together, as in Gerald Griffin’s 1829 novel The Collegians:

Oh, ma chree, m’asthora… What ails you? [“Oh, my heart, my treasure”]

Or they collocate with a related term of endearment, cushla, shown here in Miles Franklin’s Up Country (1928) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866), respectively:

And sure, Cushla-ma-chree, if you can’t stand me I’ll up and go away.

Thanks to you, little Molly – cuishla ma chree, pulse of my heart.

This cushla/cuishla/acushla is from Irish cuisle /’kʊʃlə/ “pulse”, again sometimes with the vocative particle. So cushla ma chree = cuisle mo chroí “pulse/beat of my heart”. Cuisle can also mean vein – cuisle na héigse is the fount of poetry, while cuisleoireacht means bloodletting; the implications of this connection hardly need emphasising.

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Clik here to view.Irish authors writing in English have long exploited these words. The OED cites a Frank O’Connor collection I haven’t read, Bones of Contention: “Cross me, acushla, and I’ll shift my tent”, and an early Yeats poem, ‘A Dawn-Song‘: “Wake, ma cushla, sleepy-headed”. Joyce, in Ulysses, has Simon Dedalus address Ben Dollard as “Ben machree”, while Monk Mulligan elsewhere “keened a wailing rune”:

— Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely!

Finnegans Wake, meanwhile, confers on the word a customary twist that (for me) connotes the legendary Irish warrior Finn Mac Cool:

I wisht I had better glances to peer to you through this bay-light’s growing. But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I’m getting mixed.

All of these words are especially popular in old poems and traditional songs of Ireland, as a search on Google Books shows, while machree also recalls John Ford’s silent film of 1928, Mother Machree, named after a song. I’d love to know if you use them or hear them yourself.

[archive of posts on Hiberno-English]

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The oddly named letter H is usually pronounced “aitch” /eɪtʃ/ in British English, but in Ireland we tend to aspirate it as “haitch” /heɪtʃ/. In my biology years I would always have said “a HLA marker”, never “an HLA marker”. This haitching is a distinctive feature of Hiberno-English, one that may have originated as an a hypercorrection but is now the norm in most Irish dialects.

A search on IrishTimes.com returned 1,946 hits for “a HSE” and 92 for “an HSE” (HSE = Health Service Executive), excluding readers’ letters and three false positives of Irish-language an HSE “the HSE”. Even allowing for duplications, this shows the emphatic preference for aspirating H in standard Hiberno-English. Haitchers gonna haitch.

Pronunciation comes bundled with a lot of cultural baggage, and whether one aspirates H or not can provoke strong reaction. Online you’ll find articles, blog posts, videos, forum comments and Facebook groups insisting on “aitch” and deploring “haitch”, while in Northern Ireland it’s a social/religious shibboleth of violent significance, as I’ve noted elsewhere: Catholics haitch, while Protestants aitch.

Haitching and aitching vary both regionally and socially, then, and sometimes this variation manifests in strikingly contradictory fashion. Last week’s edition of the local freesheet Galway Advertiser appears to have hedged its bets in choosing between an aitch and a haitch in the headline of a story spread across pages 1 and 2:

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Newspapers should strive for consistent style, but I’m not aiming to poke fun here. These things happen, and the consequences are negligible to nil. Regardless of how it came about, it’s an interesting discrepancy.

The history of h-dropping and h-adding at the start of various words is quite a tangle, made worse by the fact that people often feel their own version must be correct and others’ therefore can’t be. I’ve seen real fury directed at the American practice of muting the H in herb, from listeners probably unaware that sounding the H was a later convention. But that’s another can of worms-from-haitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks, to use a euphemism I heard lately.

The history of H itself is also quite complex. From the OED:

When the Roman alphabet was applied to the Germanic languages, H was used initially for the simple aspirate or breath-sound, which had arisen out of a pre-Germanic or Aryan k, through the stages of guttural aspirate /kh/, and guttural spirant /x/ . . . .
The name aitch, which is now so remote from any connection with the sound, goes back through Middle English ache to Old French ache = Spanish ache, Italian acca, pointing to a late Latin *accha, *ahha, or *aha, exemplifying the sound; cf. Italian effe, elle, emme, etc. (The earlier Latin name was ha.)

In Australia some see the spread of haitch (through the efforts of “linguistically subversive Irish nuns”) as a measure of society’s “linguistic, even moral, disintegration”. Lynne Murphy has read in several places that haitch marks the Catholic-educated in Australia, though Adrian Morgan in a comment says “there is definitely no widespread perception in Australia that such a correlation exists.”

Throughout the UK there appears to be a drift towards haitching the letter’s name. Jo Kim of the BBC Pronunciation Unit – which despite enduring protest considers “haitch” (or “haytch”) to be a legitimate variant – says the pronunciation:

is increasingly being used by native English-speaking people all across the country [i.e., the UK], irrespective of geographical provenance or social standing. Polls have shown that the uptake of haytch by younger native speakers is on the rise.

This observation is informed by research from John Wells, who in his Longman Pronunciation Dictionary presented the following trend:

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Visiting universities around Ireland, Wells was “particularly struck by the expression piː heɪtʃ diː PhD” (“pee haitch dee”) – a pronunciation that would be customary for me and most people I know.

I wonder whether aitching H correlates at all with the wine–whine merger – or, phrased another way, whether haitching H correlates with pronouncing wine and whine differently. I’d be interested to hear your preference, “aitch” or “haitch”, and what your dialect is.

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A distinctive feature of the English spoken in Ireland is the colloquial use of cat as an adjective to mean: awful, unpleasant, rough, terrible, bad, calamitous, or very disappointing. I heard it a lot as a child, and I still do occasionally in the city – someone wants to criticise a situation, such as a bad sporting performance or a job done ineptly, and they say “It’s cat” and that sums it up.

Adjectival cat shows up in writing as well; I came across it recently in Angela Bourke’s short story ‘Charm’, in her collection By Salt Water. The narrator, an eleven-year-old girl, is staying at her aunt’s and hanging out with Brian Molloy, a neighbour around her own age, and Bernie, his older cousin:

Bernie was at Molloys as well. She was their cousin and she had a job in the hospital for the summer. She was from another place up in the mountains, called Derrylynch, that Brian said was the arse-end of nowhere. He was always teasing her, saying things like that. Any time Bernie didn’t like something she said it was cat, and Brian used to go around after her asking her if the dog was cat. He said cat himself though, and if he was talking about something really bad, like his school, he said it was cat melodeon.

Bernie is later reported as saying, “it’s cat when they’re dying all over the place” (i.e., rats); and “it was cat, the things some of them expected” (i.e., men). Often it appears as cat altogether or cat melodeon (or melodium), these longer phrases emphasising the cat-ness of the situation. (Cf. the expression melodeonised  “left in an awful state”, suggesting the image of being crumpled like an accordion.)

Browsing the popular Irish web forum Boards.ie for examples, I found the following things described as “cat”: a head cold; processed food; Rocky V; poems; dark ales; bad weather; golfing ability; heavy traffic; rugby jersey design; video gameplay; an athletics result; a music performance; band members not coming to a gig; and the state of Main Street in Lanesboro. You get the idea.

The origin of this peculiar usage is uncertain: is it an abbreviation of catastrophe/catastrophic, or a derivation from Irish cat mara or cat marbh – literally “sea cat” and “dead cat”, respectively, but meaning “mischief” or “calamity”?

Bernard Share’s Slanguage quotes Victoria White in the Irish Times calling cat melodeon “the greatest expression in Hiberno-English”; her review of a book on Irish traditional music by Ciaran Carson reports his hypothesis that it comes from the aforementioned Irish phrases, and relates:

the tendency of the piano-accordion players (who often refer to their instruments as melodeons) to play two notes at once.

Two discordant notes, presumably, maybe evoking the yowling of a tom-cat on a hormonal night. But I don’t know if there’s anything to this origin story beyond speculation.

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The usual meaning of the Scottish word clishmaclaver (also clish-ma-claver, clishmaclaiver, clashmaclaver) is “idle talk, gossip, or empty chatter”. The OED says it was formed “apparently with allusion to clish-clash and claver, with echoic associations”, and finds it also used as a verb (“keep me clishmaclavering”).

Hiberno-English has the related short form clash “gossip” as both noun and verb. Terence Dolan notes clash in Sligo (“He’s an awful old clash”), while a century ago P. W. Joyce reported clashbag* “tale-bearer” or “busybody” in Armagh, Northern Ireland. There’s also the verb phrase clash on, meaning “tell tales on”.

In historian Brian Bonner’s short book A Society in Transition: Cameos of Irish Life I came across another, related sense of clishmaclaver, for a person who trades in such talk:

Every village has its vendor of local gossip, and Lagaguee was no exception. Thereabouts, the role was filled by a lady known as Cassie the Larker. The older people, when annoyed with her, called her a “clishmaclaver”, thereby expressing their contempt for her while indicating the Scottish influence on the speech of the area.

Clishmaclaver was the name of the Chambers Editors’ blog, but my encounters with the word have dwindled since that blog wound down.

The Irish phrase mar dhea, which I’ve described before as a sceptical interjection, also appears in Bonner’s book:

At eleven she made her way back to the Macklin Tavern, to join those who had gathered there to imbibe coffee or beer and exchange the gossip of the day. She took up her position among her own special cronies and in confidence, mar dhea, related the gist of the events of the early morning.

Here the phrase implies that her gossip was professedly just for her friends’ gratification, but that all parties understood it would soon be spread beyond those confines. Such is the clishmaclavering imperative.

*

* This -bag suffix remains popular in Ireland, as in the more recent ledgebag, etc.

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Few people outside Ireland are likely to have seen Soupy Norman, a cult comedy that aired in 2007 on our national station RTÉ. Essentially, Soupy uses footage from a Polish soap opera and turns it into an Irish family drama by redubbing the audio track with a surreal Hiberno-English script.

The fun lies in the lip-synching and voiceover, which are done partly to match speakers’ mouths, partly to fit the characters’ actions and interactions, and partly to serve the imaginary and often ridiculous plot. Non sequiturs pile up in disjointed rhythms to wonderfully silly effect.

Below is the first of eight episodes (9½ min. long), from where you can follow links to the rest, including a Christmas special. Your mileage may vary, but if it appeals to your sense of humour, watch the lot; every episode has its own inspired lunacies and running jokes (and, for the dialectally minded, Irish accents, expressions, and slang).

NB: Occasional strong language.

*

Soupy Norman first appeared as a single sketch on the BBC programme Time Trumpet, with the RTÉ series being a spin-off. This style of comedy has been done before in various ways – music and satire are often involved – but Soupy stands out as an original and ambitious example.

Soap opera tropes draw the viewer in; some are native to the Polish visuals, others are introduced by the absurdist dubbing track, and they serve to give Soupy a semi-cohesive structure missing from similar work by, say, the Day Job Orchestra (their audio NSFW).

So as well as being funny, Soupy is also formally interesting. Simian-themed culture blog Spank The Monkey (link is safe for work, and embeds all the videos) says it “plays around with the cliches of soap opera” and has been “assembled with a great deal of care”:

There’s the delight in being allowed to see the narrative strings: watching whole plots being set up in the dialogue which have obviously been inspired by a small visual detail, or a chance bit of lipsyncing.

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Mark Doherty and Barry Murphy, who created the show and are among its voice actors, did similar work in other productions, such as the comedy sketch show Couched. A recurring skit showed three men talking in a field, dubbed differently each time until, as a neat punchline, the sixth and final show played the original audio.

Couched has a low profile even in Ireland, partly because it was screened only once (to my knowledge) and has never appeared on DVD. So viewers are missing out on this vintage clip given a Bee Gees makeover, of sorts:

More recently, Après Match has exploited the trick, though some of that humour may be opaque to viewers unfamiliar with RTÉ’s team of sports commentators. Synching may be slightly off in some of these videos, but there are ways around that if you want to fine-tune it.

Let me know what you think if you give Soupy Norman or Mr Bee Gee a look. More importantly: would you write syncing or synching?

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