‘The Talking Trees’ by Seán Ó Faoláin is the opening story in the anthology Body and Soul: Irish Short Stories of Sexual Love, edited by David Marcus and published by Poolbeg Press in 1979. It’s a humorous coming-of-age tale of a group of teenage boys in Cork city, containing several explicit references to language.

The boys read comics from England,* “which was where they got all those swanky words like Wham, Ouch, Yaroosh, Ooof and Jolly Well.” Educated by priests and nuns, they are at a loss to understand some of the words they hear used in relation to adult and sexual behaviour.

One day the youngest, Tommy, nicknamed Gong Gong for his “wild bursts of talk like a fire alarm”,

sprayed them with the news that his sister Jenny had been thrown out of class that morning in Saint Monica’s for turning up with a red ribbon in her hair, a mother-of-pearl brooch at her neck and smelling of scent.

‘Ould Sister Eustasia,’ he fizzled, ‘made her go out in the yard and wash herself under the tap, she said they didn’t want any girls in their school who had notions.’

The three gazed at one another, and began at once to discuss all the possible sexy meanings of notions. Georgie had a pocket dictionary. ‘An ingenious contrivance’? ‘An imperfect conception (U.S.)’? ‘Small wares’? It did not make sense.

The boys turn for help to Mrs Coffey, in whose sweetshop they hang about. She suggests asking “two giggling girls” who are eating toffee nearby, and Georgie does so with consummate politeness:

‘Pardon me ladies, but do you by any chance happen to have notions?’

The two girls stared at one another with cow’s eyes, blushed scarlet and fled from the shop shrieking with laughter. Clearly a notion was very sexy.

A plan is hatched: the boys will pay a local woman of notorious reputation to explain to them or show them her notion or notions, whatever that might entail. The oldest boy, Dick, organises the money and says to Gong Gong:

‘If we subscribe seventeen and sixpence, do you think you can contribute half-a-crown?’

‘I could feck it, I suppose.’

‘Feck?’

Gong Gong looked shamedly at the tiles.

‘I mean steal,’ he whispered.

‘Don’t they give you any pocket money?’

‘They give me threepence a week.’

‘Well, we have only a week to go. If you can, what was your word, feck half-a-crown, you may come.’

‘To steal’ is one of several meanings of the word feck in Ireland. I’m not sure what Ó Faoláin’s intent was in making Dick unaware of it: maybe the usage was not common in Cork at that time, maybe it’s for readers’ benefit, or maybe Dick’s time in England means he’s not fully up to speed with some of the Irish vernacular.

Irish author Sean Ó Faoláin

Anyway, about those notions. Most of the major dictionaries are of little use in explaining the notions Sister Eustasia warned Jenny about. For the most part they echo Georgie’s pocket dictionary: opinion, idea, belief, conception, whim, etc.; or in plural, sewing items. The OED, however, includes one sense that comes close:

Brit. regional (chiefly Sc.) and U.S. regional. A liking or affection for someone, esp. one of a romantic or sexual nature.

All its examples are in the singular, e.g. Had a strang notion o’ the lass mysel’ (1789); a Yankee may have a kinder sneakin’ notion arter her (1864); This soldier took a notion to my granny (1985). While the idea of affection or attraction here is evident, the sexual or amorous element doesn’t appear to be necessarily central, or even necessary.

In Ireland, notion(s) can have very particular connotations of sexual or flirtatious behaviour. The Chambers Dictionary of Slang has an entry for the Irish usage, defining it as “amorous inclinations, usu. in phr. have a notion of, to be sexually attracted to”.

Bernard Share’s invaluable Slanguage defines notions as “sexual inclinations” and adds the same phrase have a notion of, “be amorously attracted to”. Share cites Ó Faoláin’s story as an example, along with this one from Michael ‘Gossie’ Browne in Mary Ryan et al. (eds.), No Shoes in Summer (1995):

‘It’s a hard bind when a dacent woman has a notion of you and does you a good turn . . . unless of course you get a notion of her as well!’

Notions has yet another sense in Hiberno-English, that of pretension or affectation. (Of the two Irish senses, this is the only one I use.) Someone who has notions or is getting notions may have an inflated sense of their own importance, status, or charm. Marian Keyes’s Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married has a fine example:

‘She has notions, that one. She thinks she’s it. She’d think she was too good-looking for Dennis, even though he’s a lovely fellow.’

Context normally makes clear whether someone’s notions are amorous, affected, or otherwise.

*

* Ó Faoláin lists The Gem, The Magnet, The Boys’ Own Paper, Chums, and The Captain.

[more posts on English as we use it in Ireland]

A couple of excerpts from Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009), a fine polemic by the Irish critic and author Fintan O’Toole:

One of the great strengths of Irish culture [is] its capacity for double-think. For a range of reasons – the simultaneous existence of paganism and Christianity, the ambiguous relationship of indigenous society to a colonial power, the long experience of emigration – Irish culture developed a particularly strong capacity for operating simultaneously within different mental frameworks. This is one of the reasons for the rich inventiveness of Irish artistic life and for much of the humour, teasing and wordplay that enliven social interaction. Irish double-think is wonderfully summed up by the old woman in the 1930s who, asked by Sean O’Faolain if she believed in the little people, replied, ‘I do not, sir, but they’re there.’

Much of this is of course unprovable (and unfalsifiable), and you could probably make a case for the same capacity for doublethink in other countries. But O’Toole’s ideas are, as always, food for thought.

He suggests the same trait might also explain how we can be genuinely shocked at official confirmation of abuses of power, even when such abuse is common knowledge. Related to this is our excessive deference to authority, with which we have a weird relationship (again, by no means peculiar to Ireland).

Speaking of which:

In Ireland, there was a refinement on Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous ramblings about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. The Irish added another category: unknown knowns, things that were understood to be the case and yet remained unreal. At its most extreme this worked as a kind of collective psychosis, analogous to the idea of dissociation in psychiatry, where, in response to trauma, the mind distances itself from experiences that it does not wish to process. This process was at work in relation to corruption. . . . With this habit of mind so well ingrained it was possible to vote for a fraudster while believing that this was not an act of collusion but merely, for example, an expression of sympathy . . .

Often, voting has less to do with performance or policy than with a lifelong affiliation to a particular party. This derives in part from habit and a natural aversion to change and the unknown, a case of “better the devil you know”. But in some cases the familial and emotional allegiance to the idea of a political tribe is so deep-rooted that alternatives are effectively unthinkable.

On the plus side: the Irish capacity for doublethink, O’Toole proposes, may have had social and cultural benefits too, fostering a more fluid interpretation of reality which would have obvious implications for creative activity, with its affinity for pluralities and ease with irresolution.

This embrace of contradiction and superposition also manifests in the vernacular Hiberno-English tongue, with its ubiquitous irony and paradoxical phrases, stacked negatives (no harm; not bad; devil at all; not the worst), and prominent conditionals inherited from Irish (I’d be the same; Would you be well?).

Is it a good thing? Well, it is and it isn’t.

From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):

let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child

was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”

I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.

Standard English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?

Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)

Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)

Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standard English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.

How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:

a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.

An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.

This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.

[image source]

Despite its vintage, its logic and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.

Garner is incorrect, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standard English, but it is standard and thoroughly normal in Hiberno-English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you prize minimal syllabicity, or prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically amn’t has unique appeal.

Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)

Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)

So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2nd ed.) associates it with “negative first-person questions”.

Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is not so confined. It’s used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.

I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)

And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)

A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.

My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Storify for interested readers.

If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)

Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)

Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere thirty-one hits.

Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.

Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”

In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.

Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?

*

Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.

I’m part of a tribe that thinks of grammar mainly as morphology and syntax, not spelling and style. But for more of both, visit the official website or browse the #grammarday tag on Twitter. Don’t miss John E. McIntyre’s wonderful pulp pastiche Grammarnoir, starting here and concluding today.

Edit: I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t':

Ireland has a curious expression whereby this weather is used to mean “these days”. It normally occurs at the end of a clause or sentence, though it doesn’t have to. It’s a very colloquial phrase, more often heard than seen. But it appears sometimes in speechlike prose, such as these examples from the Irish chatroom boards.ie:

(1) He’s a sad man this weather.

(2) what coolant temp are you logging this weather?

(3) Wouldn’t imagine their stock was exactly flying out the door this weather.

(4) Hi, anyone else struggling with tacky paint this weather?

This weather meaning these days is an expression I’ve used most of my life, but I hadn’t really thought about it until I saw a tweet from Warren Maguire (whom some of you may remember from a post here last year on his survey of accents):

#Tyrone dialect 'this weather' = 'these days', e.g. 'The cattle's dear this weather'. Similar to temporal use of Irish 'aimsir' = 'weather'.—
Warren Maguire (@warren_maguire) April 23, 2014

(Tyrone, if you’re wondering, is a large county in Northern Ireland.) Another linguist, Pavel Iosad, drew connections with other Celtic languages:

@warren_maguire well aimsir is originally just 'time'; Welsh amser is only 'time' but Breton amzer also 'weather' (& cf French _temps_)—
Pavel Iosad (@anghyflawn) April 23, 2014

I added a note to the effect that the phrase was not limited to Tyrone but was also used in counties Galway and Mayo in the west of Ireland. It may well have informal currency all over the island, as it seems to come from the Irish word aimsir /ˈæmʃɪɾʲ/, which can refer to both weather and time.

As a child I learned aimsir principally in the “weather” sense, with am meaning “time” in most cases. But aimsir meaning “time” is apparent in many Irish phrases, such as le haimsir “with time”, and caitheamh aimsire “pastime” (literally spending time). Aimsir is also the Irish word for grammatical tense.

MacBain’s Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language has an entry on aimsir that suggests a possible development from am:

time, so Irish; Old Irish amser, Welsh amser, Breton amzer, possibly a Celtic ammesserâ; either a compound of am, time (ammensîrâ, from sîr, long?), or amb-mensura, root mens, measure, Latin mensus, English measure. Ascoli and Stokes give the Celtic as ád-messera, from ad-mensura.

Either way, it seems the temporal sense came first, then the weather-related one. I suspect a connection with farming, given the deep relationship between agricultural and seasonal rhythms – or maybe it’s not so specific, and emerged simply as a result of the correspondence between weather and time of year. I’d welcome your ideas.

Warren Maguire, meanwhile, would like to know if this weather = these days “is found in any English varieties that haven’t been in contact with Irish/Scottish Gaelic”. Jeffrey L. Kallen, in his chapter on Irish English in Englishes Around the World, says this sense of weather is “not found elsewhere”, but do let us know if there’s anything like it in your dialect.

[Archive of posts on Hiberno-English]

[image: 'Harvest Time', from the National Library of Ireland's Lawrence Collection: Irish Life series. NLI Ref.: L_ROY_03303, via Wikimedia Commons]

God forgive me, I’ve written a listicle. Below are ten words and usages in Irish English (or Hiberno-English*) that you mightn’t be familiar with unless you’re a Sentence first veteran, a dialect scholar, or of course Irish, or Irishish.

Some were borrowed from Irish and became part of Irish English. Others are English words with meanings peculiar (or mostly so) to Ireland. What follows is just a summary, but each word links to a post I’ve written with more detail, notes on pronunciation, examples from literature and real life, and so on.

1. Smacht is a noun loaned from Irish meaning control, discipline, or order. You might put smacht on something or someone, like an untidy room or an unruly team.

2. Moryah has various spellings all based on the Irish phrase mar dhea. It’s an ironic or sceptical interjection used to cast doubt or mild derision on an assertion.

3. Give out in Ireland commonly means to scold or complain: You can give out to someone, or just give out. It’s often intensified in different ways, e.g. He was giving out stink to them.

4. Asthore again comes from Irish: a stór is a term of endearment literally meaning treasure in the vocative case.

5. Hames means mess, and is usually used in the phrase make a hames of something. There’s an implication that the mess arose through carelessness or ineptitude.

6. Cat is used as an adjective in Ireland to mean awful or terrible. All sorts of things – from bad weather to the state of the country – might be described as cat. I realised only recently how weird this is.

7. Yoke is a very handy yoke altogether. It’s a placeholder word, used informally to refer to an unspecified object or indescribable person. It can also be a root in more elaborate placeholders such as yokeamabob.

8. Thick in Irish English can mean angry – either stubborn and sullen or belligerent and argumentative. It’s often intensified by fierce or pure (“very”): She got pure thick with me.

9. and 10. Acushla machree, another poetic term of endearment, is anglicised from the Irish a cuisle mo chroí “pulse [or beat] of my heart”. You see it more in old texts and songs than contemporary usage.

Obviously some of these are current in Irish, not just Irish English. And words should be usages. But a listicle header is no place for nuance.

*

* Some scholars distinguish between these terms. I’ll write about that another time.

In Seán Ó Faoláin’s novel Bird Alone (1936) the narrator, a young boy, is waiting alone in town for his grandfather:

After shivering under the thatch of a cabin-end for an hour I began to search for him – as by instinct among the pubs. Sure enough, I found him gosthering with some old toady in the Royal Hotel…

Gosthering gave me pause. It was obviously Hiberno-English and meant something like “chatting”, but it was not a word in my idiolect, and I didn’t remember coming across it before. I must have, though, because a quick search showed it was used in Seán O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman:

I’ve no time to be standin’ here gostherin’ with you.

And in Dubliners by James Joyce, albeit used as a noun and spelt slightly differently:

he was leaning on the counter in his shirt-sleeves having a deep goster with Alterman Cowley.

So far so straightforward. But when I looked it up in the reference books, I found that the word has a constellation of meanings, some closely related and overlapping, some less so, as well as an uncertain etymology. The semantic variation is apparent from a browse of gosther and gosthering in Google Books.

Chambers Slang Dictionary by Jonathon Green says goster functions as a noun and verb meaning conversation or chat. He notes the affinity to UK dialectal gauster, goster “to gossip, to talk, to waste time chatting”, but does not assert this as the origin.

T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English says it means “empty talk, empty chat; a gossipy person”, adding gasther to the set of variants, and suggests it comes from Middle English galstre “to make a noise, brag, boast”. He too mentions the British dialect word gauster, noting its inclusion in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.

The ME word galstre is of obscure origins (OED: “perhaps some kind of derivative of Old English galan, gale v.1 to sing, cry out”), but the semantic thread spooled from it runs through several British dialect dictionaries that gloss its descendant, gaustering, as “imperious, boasting”, and sometimes also “dictatorial”. The OED incorporates this sense in its definition of gauster:

To behave in a noisy, boisterous, or swaggering fashion; to brag or boast; in some localities, to laugh noisily.

The laughing aspect is foregrounded in Collins’ definition of goster, which it calls a Northern England dialect word meaning (1) to laugh uncontrollably, or (2) to gossip. Merriam-Webster Unabridged is still broader: “to behave boldly or boisterously : swagger, bully”; and “to waste time conspicuously especially by talking and gossiping”.

Gauster is a plausible etymon of gosther, but Irish origins are also possible. Bernard Share’s Slanguage, defining goster simply as “chat, conversation”, compares it to Irish gasrán cainte “conversation”, while P.W. Joyce’s English As We Speak It In Ireland has goster “gossipy talk”, from Irish gastaire “a prater,* a chatterer”.

According to Niall Ó Dónaill’s authoritative Irish-English dictionary, a gastaire is a “smart, impudent fellow” – and gasróg is a “smart expression; quick retort” – which brings us close again to the idea of boasting, but not quite. The more I find out, the less I know.

On an unrelated note, Ó Faoláin’s Bird Alone, which started all this, also has the unusual form wo’not, as in “I wo’not”, an emphatic form of I won’t or I will not. This term I have heard, in west of Ireland speech, but not in some time.

Image: Ein Süßes Geheimnis [A Sweet Secret] by Adolf Hering, 1892, via Wikimedia Commons

* OED: “A person who talks foolishly, pompously, or at great length, esp. to little purpose.”

Everyone came home from England was questioned. (Timothy O’Grady, I Could Read the Sky)

Contact clauses are dependent clauses attached directly to their antecedent, i.e., without any relative pronoun. For example: a book I read; the town we visited; a person you admire. In each case that, which or who might be added after the noun phrase, but doesn’t have to be.

Otto Jespersen introduced the term, calling them contact clauses “because what characterizes them is the close contact in sound and sense between the clause and what precedes it”.

It is a very old construction in English. Though fully standard, it drew criticism in the 18th century from grammarians who sought to impose Latin grammar on English. Latin grammar requires a relative pronoun in this context; thus Lindley Murray called it “omitting the relative” and advised against it.

Contact clauses are still sometimes called omitted relatives, but it’s more a partial overlap than a precise synonymy, and it may also be a bit misleading. Jespersen again, on the construction’s nature and vintage (from A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, part III, 1927):

It is customary in these cases to say that the relative pronoun who (whom) or which is “understood” or “omitted”, and the clauses are called elliptic. But here as so often in grammatical disquisitions these terms really explain nothing. I very much doubt whether anyone without any grammatical training would think that anything is left out in the sentences mentioned above. If we speak here of “omission” or “subaudition” or “ellipsis”, the reader is apt to get the false impression that the fuller expression is the better one as being complete, and that the shorter expression is to some extent faulty or defective, or something that has come into existence in recent times out of slovenliness. This is wrong: the constructions are very old in the language and have not come into existence through the dropping of a previously necessary relative pronoun.

What prompted me to look into contact clauses is a book I read recently called I Could Read the Sky, by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke. It is a sad and lyrical novel about emigration, loss, and our deep connection to place.

Throughout, there is regular use of contact clauses of a particular type, where the absent relative pronoun would be the subject, not the object: hence subject contact clause, a term I adopt here.

The construction is uncommon in standard English but characteristic of colloquial Irish English, and may be seen in some of these examples from O’Grady and Pyke’s book:

1. It was Pat Creevy told me about the abattoir.

2. The well in the long field. Matt says there’s a fish in it will tell you how your relations are doing in America.

3. But my mother says he’s started teaching the flute to a young lad named Wilson comes in to him on a bus from eleven miles away.

4. Between the young people in the pews and the men kneeling in the back is the young Protestant boy was taking lessons from Da in the flute.

5. Everyone came home from England was questioned.

6. In the beet factory in Ipswich I took the name J. Brady after the name was written in the back of the coat Ma bought me at the fair.

7. He called himself Gallagher after a Donegal hurler and I called myself Rose after one of the men made the flute that was buried with Da.

8. Francie got hit with a lump of concrete flew off the end of the jackhammer.

9. There was a site in Barnet must have been four acres anyway and there it was mostly shuttering.

10. Anybody didn’t move fast enough he cursed them.

11. On the top floor is a man from Belfast always wears a suit and a tie.

12. You’d think it was the room of a man would drive a car for a bishop only for the pictures of women in frames along the shelf above his bed.

13. He’s a suit and tie on, everything in place, and he’s wearing the gold crown was up on the shelf above his bed.

14. There was a window came out through the slope of the roof and I remember a tall glass there filled with irises.

15. He has a son my age told me that old Peter put out a report to the farms beside him…

That should be enough to give an idea of subject contact clauses in Irish English. Jespersen said it’s not common “except in some well-defined instances, chiefly after it is, there is (are), here is (are)”, e.g., Oscar Wilde’s I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. But the examples above show far more diverse usage.

Numbers 6 and 7 could be misread by inferring after as having to do with time. It’s not “after the name was written” but “after the name that was written”; and it’s not “after one of the men made the flute” but “after one of the men who made the flute”. No. 5, which also appears at the top of this post, is a nice garden path sentence.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar says “subject relative pronouns are not now normally omissible”. In other words that, which or who would normally appear in 1–15 above. It offers the examples Who was it said ‘Inside every fat man…’ and There’s someone at the door says you know him. These, however, would be quite typical of vernacular Irish speech.

Strang’s History of English (1970), quoted in ODEG, says contact clauses are:

ancient structures of independent origin, not just relatives with pronouns left out. . . . At the beginning of II [the period 1570–1770] . . . they were still extensively used where the ‘relative’ had subject function, as in Shakespeare’s I see a man here needs not live by shifts. This is ambiguous . . . . There was good reason for confining the structure to object relations, where there is no ambiguity (as in Defoe, the same trade she had followed in Ireland): since the 18C this limitation has been customary.

Except, as we have seen, in Ireland.

Jeffrey Kallen’s paper ‘The English Language in Ireland’ [PDF] provides examples from J.M. Synge (It was my own son hit me) and others. He points out that lines such as I had three aunts nurses (i.e., I had three aunts who were nurses) show that “particularly with the copular verb be, it is more than just the complementiser which may be deleted”.

Subject contact clauses are familiar to me, both in my own (occasional) usage and that of others around me in the west of Ireland, but I’m still getting my head around the formal analysis. And I haven’t even mentioned prepositions and clefts, but this post is long enough already.

One last thing worth noting: Contact clauses are similar to apo koinou (Greek for “in common”), a construction consisting, writes Robert Burchfield, “of two clauses which have a word or phrase in common. A standard example (cited by Visser) is I have an uncle is a myghty erle, in which an uncle is the object of I have and also introduces the following clause.” It is common in Shakespeare’s writing, less so nowadays.

Update:

Sociolinguist Matt Gordon, on Twitter, let me know that African American Vernacular English also has this feature, and shared a link to a short paper [PDF] by John Rickford on AAVE phonology and grammar. The relevant passage:

Absence of relative pronoun (who, which, what or that) as in “That’s the man ∅ come here” for SE [standard English] “That’s the man who came here.” Note that the omitted form is a subject relative pronoun (who). Many varieties of English allow for the omission of object relative pronouns, e.g. “That’s the man (whom) I saw,” but the omission of subject relatives is rarer, and more unique to AAVE.

In an article in the Irish Independent this week on privatisation fears and political shenanigans, Gene Kerrigan used a great word borrowed (and anglicised) from the Gaelic:

Is it really okay for the Taoiseach [Irish prime minister] to do what he did, then he makes a non-apology and everyone moves on?

Did Enda Kenny lie to us?

You won’t find a straightforward statement in which he said he had nothing to do with the stroke. Instead, he said, “ministers are free to make nominations to particular boards”. Sleeveen language. Deliberately deceptive, while taking pains not to formally lie.

A sleeveen is a sly, smooth-tongued person, a rogue or a trickster. Oxford Dictionaries defines it as “an untrustworthy or cunning person”, Collins says it refers to “a sly obsequious smooth-tongued person”, while Yeats glossed it as a “mean fellow”. You get the idea.

Despite appearances it can be used affectionately, like most Irish insults, but this is obviously not the case above, nor is it normally.

Sleeveen comes from Irish slíbhín “sly person”, to which Dinneen adds slighbhín. The Irish words’ s can be closer to /ʃ/ “sh”, so the spelling shleeveen is also used – as are sleveen, sleiveen, and slieveen. It’s often used in political contexts, and, like smacht, occasionally makes the headlines:

Slíbhín may derive from sliabh, Irish for “mountain”, plus the diminutive suffix -ín, however unfair this seems to small mountain-dwellers. Sliabh is the etymon proposed by most of the reference works I checked.

The roots of sliabh lie in physical geography. MacBain’s Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language ties it to sleamhuinn “slippery, smooth”, and compares it with English slope and slip (cf. the Proto-Indo-European root *sleubh- “to slide, slip”, source of the sleeve into which we slip our arm).

P. W. Joyce, in English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910), offers the etymology slígh “a way” + bin “sweet, melodious”: a sweet-mannered fellow. To this description he adds smooth-tongued, sly, and guileful, and says sleeveen is “universal all over the South and Middle”.

Whatever the precise origins of sleeveen, a century later it remains a popular, if niche, insult. Here are some examples from various sources:

He is a parish pump shleeveen of the worst sort. A man who will do and say anything to keep his seat.

Nidge ya little slieveen, always able to snake ur way out of trouble #LoveHate [Nidge is a character in Love/Hate, an Irish TV drama.]

Every townland in the country can spit venom about a poor referee who didn’t see some sleeveen bounce the ball as he went around the full-back…

This is the first time I’ve received any sort of invitation to a political fundraiser, and it turns out to be in aid of the aspirations of a catholic, sleeveen, poisonous asp.

Beamish manages to get up to some devilment while here, ambushing shleeveen rent collector Michael Feeney and relieving him of his takings…

Fianna Fail shleeveen deputies would be there in a shot if there was an allowance for it. [Fianna Fáil = an Irish political party.]

Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams rounded on the Fianna Fáil leader and the “sleeveen” language and “weasel words” he used. [Sinn Féin = an Irish political party.]

Lets see how well the arrogant Irish sleeveen publicans who have taken their customers for granted for so long deal with this one.

Sneaky self promoting shleeveen he definitely is.

That FG T.D. on #sixone is only a sleveen as well. Refused to answer a perfectly simple question from Bryan Dobson re voting for McNulty. [FG = Fine Gael, an Irish political party; T.D. = Teachta Dála, a member of the Dáil or lower house of Irish parliament; Six One = evening news on Irish TV.]

He struck me as being the Dáil 2.0 style of parish pump, sleeveen politician.

ah yeh collies, i wouldnt mind i grew up on a farm and we had severel of em and one bite me ,they are just a sleiveen of a dog an tds are the biggest sleiveens of time thats for damn sure

“And she wouldn’t stand for to be chuffed up by any oul shleeveen. ‘Go way with yer plamas and yer grah-mo-crees,’ she tell them all.”

Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien, used it under his Myles na gCopaleen moniker:

…denounce me to your even weightier wife as a thief, a fly-by-night, a sleeveen and a baucaugh-shool. [travelling beggar, from Irish bacach siúil]

And playwright Hugh Leonard explained it briefly in Out After Dark:

“That fellow’s a sleeveen,” he said. It was a pejorative word meaning a little mountainy fellow, as treacherous as he was unpredictable.

Sleeveen also has dialectal currency in Canada. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English has several entries under various spellings, including sleeveen as a verb meaning “steal”. Its main entry has assorted definitions and examples.

Even so, it doesn’t appear to be well known: it stumped most of these Newfoundland hockey players:

A couple of days ago I tweeted this:

Below is the image included in the tweet, in case it doesn’t appear above. It’s from a recent poll by UK research firm YouGov in which 2018 people in Britain were asked how attractive or unattractive they found 12 accents in Britain and Ireland. In this post I want to address the poll and some of the responses to it.

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Some news outlets are calling them “the twelve main accents of the British Isles”, but that’s not what they are. YouGov also uses the term British Isles to refer to both Britain and Ireland, and though the phrase is often intended simply as a geographical descriptor, it’s politically loaded so I avoid it.*

On to the poll results. I found them a little surprising. RP (Received Pronunciation) is up there, as you’d expect, but a long way off the accent judged most attractive: ‘Southern Irish’. This phrase proved contentious in the replies to my tweet, many of which were along the lines of: ‘Oh, do we all have one accent now?’ or ‘What on earth do they mean by Southern?’

These are fair objections, and the first one could also apply to Northern Irish, Welsh, and others. (Also, given the prevalence of Estuary English its exclusion is curious.) But a small, quick survey like this is always going to simplify, generalise, and mislead by omission. Southern Irish was presumably chosen to distinguish it from Northern Irish.

It’s not an unheard-of classification. Séamas Moylan adopts it matter-of-factly in his fine historical review Southern Irish English (Geography Publications, 2009), describing it as the variety “spoken in the part of Ireland roughly coterminous with the Irish Republic (Donegal being the most obvious exception)”. He abbreviates it SIE throughout.

Raymond Hickey’s map of Hiberno-English dialect regions may serve as a helpful point from which to consider the lumping–splitting axis of Irish accents (though it concerns dialect, which encompasses grammar and vocabulary as well as pronunciation).

For a small country, Ireland has tremendous accent diversity. There are huge differences between the accents of, for example, Dublin, Cork, Kerry, Waterford, Limerick, Mayo, Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal, and the midlands. And any area can be further subdivided by those with a good ear for this.

If you asked a group of British people (many of whom would never have visited or travelled around Ireland) what they thought of each of the above accents and others besides, I suspect most of them would struggle to answer. Ireland’s abundant regional accents just aren’t familiar to people who aren’t Irish or Irish-ish, or who haven’t spent significant time here.

Here are the counties, for reference. I’m in Galway on the west coast:

As Ben Trawick-Smith writes at Dialect Blog, in his helpful overview of Irish accents:

The problem is, Ireland in some ways has too many varieties of English to easily classify into smaller sub-areas. Take Dublin, for example. It seems there are as many accents in that city as there are people, and many of these accents are wildly different from each other. These differences are found in many parts of Ireland, where it often seems that every village has a totally different way of speaking from the one next door.

(Tip: Read the comments at Dialect Blog, but not on the YouGov page.)

Just how granular can we go with accent differentiation? Try this:

To return from splitting to lumping: What British people have in mind when asked about the ‘Southern Irish’ accent is open to speculation. I don’t think the survey had an audio/video element. An Irish accent to most people outside Ireland is probably something like those of Sinéad O’Connor, Brendan Gleeson, or Colin Farrell – Dublin-ish. Cillian Murphy and Roy Keane, from Cork in the south south, are exceptions in having fairly well-known Irish accents from outside the Pale.

I like most Irish and British accents, and there are some (like Scottish and Donegal accents) that I’m especially partial to. Feel free to share your favourites or your thoughts on the survey in a comment below. This PDF has the full survey results, with more detail on how the answers break down demographically.

Edit:

A few more tweets of interest since the post went up:

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* I should have tweeted Britain + Ireland or UK + Ireland instead of British Isles + Ireland. Ireland can refer either to the island, including Northern Ireland (which is part of the UK), or to the Irish state, often called the Republic of Ireland. It’s all quite complicated and somewhat beside the point here.

Claire Keegan’s superb novella Foster, expanded from a short story published in the New Yorker in 2010, has an idiom I remember hearing in childhood and only seldom since. The book’s narrator is a young girl in an unfamiliar place, accompanied here by a woman, Mrs Kinsella, with whom she is staying temporarily:

Out in the street, the sun feels strong again, blinding. Some part of me wishes it would go away, that it would cloud over so I could see properly. We meet people the woman knows. Some of these people stare at me and ask who I am. One of them has a new baby in a pushchair. Mrs Kinsella bends down and coos and he slobbers a little and starts to cry.

‘He’s making strange,’ the mother says. ‘Pay no heed.’

The verb phrase make strange means to act up or be nervous or shy, etc., when encountering a stranger or strange situation. It’s normally said of babies or small children, but not always.

Like many expressions characteristic of Hiberno-English it seems to have been loaned from Irish, where coimhthíos a dhéanamh le duine literally means ‘to make strangeness with someone’, or to be shy or aloof in their presence; coimhthíos means strangeness, shyness, aloofness or alienation.

Another phrase, bheith deoranta le duine, means essentially the same thing with a different verb (be rather than make) and, said of adults, can also mean to be distant with someone.

John Banville, in The Untouchable, points to a sinister origin in folklore:

The Irish say, when a child turns from its parents, that it is making strange; it comes from the belief that fairy folk, a jealous tribe, would steal a too-fair human babe and leave a changeling in its place.

T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English says make strange means ‘to become uncomfortable or nervous or uneasy or distraught’, finding it ‘restricted to HE and based on the Irish idiom’. He includes a non-baby-related example from A New Look at the Language Question by Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin: ‘Many words which now appear simply gnarled, or which “make strange” or seem opaque to most readers, would be released into the shaped flow of a new public language’.

But the expression is usually applied to children’s behaviour; an online search shows it recurring especially in Irish parenting forums and articles (e.g., the Irish Times). It appears to a lesser degree elsewhere, such as Canada and the US, and it seems plausible that Irish emigrants exported it in these cases. Since the behaviour is not uncommon in babies, I wonder if there are other terms for it.

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Keegan’s Foster has one more passage I want to quote here. Well, it has many – but this one concerns language, specifically the want of vocabulary for new feelings and experiences when one is growing up. The girl we’ve already met is about to take a supervised bath in Mrs Kinsella’s house:

She tests the water and I step in, trusting her, but the water is too hot.

‘Get in,’ she says.

‘It’s too hot.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

I put one foot through the steam and feel, again, the same rough scald. I keep my foot in the water, and then, when I think I can’t stand it any longer, my thinking changes, and I can. This water is deeper than any I have ever bathed in. Our mother bathes us in what little she can, and makes us share. After a while, I lie back and through the steam watch the woman as she scrubs my feet. The dirt under my nails she prises out with tweezers. She squeezes shampoo from a plastic bottle, lathers my hair and rinses the lather off. Then she makes me stand and soaps me all over with a cloth. Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

‘Now your clothes,’ she says.

For more posts on the use of English in Ireland, see my archive of posts on Hiberno-English.

She be’s out on that bike every Sunday

They do be up late chatting

Everyone knows about grammatical tense – it involves placing a situation in time, using inflections and auxiliaries to mark temporal location in the past, present, future, etc. Aspect, though less familiar, also concerns time: specifically, how a speaker views the temporal structure or properties of an action or situation, such as whether it’s complete, habitual, or still in progress.

So for example, in the progressive aspect an action is, was, or will be in progress: am walking, was writing, will be singing. It pairs auxiliary be with a gerund-participle complement (__ing). The terminology can be forbidding, but the structure is familiar.

Then there’s habitual aspect for habitual or repeated events or states. In the past tense, English can use would (She would make tea when we called) or used to (We used to meet daily). In English present tense, habitual aspect is not marked, and is often indicated with adverbs or adverbials: We go there [regularly / all the time].

Irish English, also called Hiberno-English, can express habitual aspect in present tense by enlisting Irish (Gaelic) grammar. In Irish, tá mé (which can contract to táim) means ‘I am’, literally ‘is me’. But bíonn mé (→ bím) means ‘I (habitually) am’ – a different sense of be. The distinction is so intrinsic to Irish that our ancestors refashioned English to incorporate it.

We did this in several ways. Sometimes do is used:

I’m not so old as you do hear them say. (J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints)

Sometimes be is inflected:

To be going to the place in which there be’s no welcome (Anthony Raftery, ‘The History of the Bush’, tr. Douglas Hyde)

And sometimes be is paired with auxiliary do:

And who is the gentleman does be visiting there? (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Synge’s line shows the do construction, which looks like an emphatic or contrastive do but is spoken unstressed. Hyde’s translation shows the be’s form, also spelt bes, bees or biz. Joyce’s line shows the do be form (No Sinatra jokes, please), as well as a subject contact clause. Do be and be’s are also used for questions and negatives: Does she be tired after work?; Be’s he always like that?

Different scholars use different terms for this grammatical feature, including habitual, durative habitual, iterative, consuetudinal and generic aspect, ‘often with very subtle subdistinctions’ according to Markku Filppula. Regardless of what term is used, habituality is their chief constituent. P.W. Joyce elaborates in English As We Speak It In Ireland:

In the Irish language (but not in English) there is what is called the consuetudinal tense, i.e. denoting habitual action or existence. It is a very convenient tense, so much so that the Irish, feeling the want of it in their English, have created one by the use of the word do with be: ‘I do be at my lessons every evening from 8 to 9 o’clock.’ ‘There does be a meeting of the company every Tuesday.’ ‘’Tis humbuggin’ me they do be.’ (‘Knocknagow.’)

Sometimes this is expressed by be alone without the do; but here the be is also often used in the ordinary sense of is without any consuetudinal meaning. ‘My father bees always at home in the morning’: ‘At night while I bees reading my wife bees knitting.’ (Consuetudinal.) ‘You had better not wait till it bees night.’ (Indicative.)

Though be’s can be heard in pockets around the island, I associate it with speakers from northern counties. My roommate in college had a strong and distinctive Donegal dialect, and when I knew him (he’s no longer with us) I heard be’s very regularly. I use it myself infrequently, not having grown up with it but liking it enough to adopt it. Do and do be are my usual choices for habitual aspect.

Lady Gregory (1852–1932)

Here’s an example of be’s from Patrick McCabe’s novel Winterwood:

It be’s hard for strangers trying to do that – tell us menfolk one from the other, with our great big beards and red curly heads.

And one from Robert Bernen’s story ‘Brock’:

‘But sure plenty dogs be’s that way,’ Mary interposed.
‘Aye,’ Paddy answered. ‘Some does.’

An example of do be, from Joyce’s Exiles:

Up half the night he does be.

One from Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland:

The people do be full of stories of all the cures she did.

This line from J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints has both do be and do forms:

They are, holy father; they do be always sitting here at the crossing of the roads, asking a bit of copper from them that do pass…

While the next (also from Synge) offers both, plus a couple of do be negatives. Though these latter resemble imperatives (don’t be looking on people), they are describing something habitually not done:

For it’s a raw, beastly day we do have each day, till I do be thinking it’s well for the blind don’t be seeing them gray clouds driving on the hill, and don’t be looking on people with their noses red, the like of your nose, and their eyes weeping and watering, the like of your eyes, God help you, Timmy the smith.

Loreto Todd, in Green English, breaks down the distinction thus: Mary {goes | is going | biz/bees going | does be going} to school, noting that biz/bees ‘suggests regularity’ and does be ‘both regularity and habitualness’. She offers an example from live speech to highlight the difference:

Female A was house proud and liked her drying cloth to be on its peg when not in use. Female B often left the drying cloth on the draining board and was told: ‘That cloth biz on the peg when it doesn’t be drying dishes!’

When the main verb in a clause is also do, it can lead to reduplicative strings which, though unremarked by Irish people, might raise an eyebrow in others. The prologue to Edna O’Brien’s Tales for the Telling refers to ‘the deeds they do be doing’, while Ulysses has a woman who ‘hid herself in a clock to find out what they do be doing’. Séamas Moylan’s Southern Irish English offers ‘I do do it myself an odd time.’ The do do utterance is something I do do myself; again, the first do is unstressed, unlike in contrastive or emphatic uses.

Moylan reports that this ‘very typical feature of Rural SIE was already a shibboleth of the educational establishment’ in the late 19thC, quoting Peadar Ó Laoghaire’s My Story in which the priest recalls an inspector insulting a child and his family ‘before the entire school!’ for using do be. A reader of Sentence first reported their teacher forcing students to cut out and bury text with do be in it. The persistence of the usage despite such vicious opposition ‘is probably an index of the need felt for the aspectual distinction it makes’, Moylan writes.

The origin of these habitual-aspect forms in Irish English is not entirely clear but seems to point to Irish in contact with English. Dialectologist Joseph Wright in 1898 reported several examples of ‘to do be’ from Ireland and southern England. Hickey 2007 (PDF) summarises it as ‘convergence with English input in south, possibly with influence from Scots via Ulster; otherwise transfer of category from Irish’.*

Hickey 2005 (PDF) elaborates:

In syntax, there are many features which either have a single source in Irish or at least converged with English regional input to produce stable structures in later Irish English. To begin with, one must bear in mind that adult speakers learning a second language, especially in an unguided situation, search for equivalents to the grammatical categories they know from their native language. The less they know and use the second language, the more obvious this search is. A case in point would involve the habitual in Irish. […] There is no one-to-one formal or semantic correspondence to this in English, so what appears to have happened is that the Irish availed of the afunctional do of declarative sentence, which was still present in English at the time of renewed plantation in the early seventeenth century…

Lastly, Jeffrey L. Kallen 2012 (PDF) has some detail on usage, semantic differentiation and geographical distribution. He says the be form (what I’ve styled be’s) ‘is relatively invariant, almost always occurring as bes (sometimes spelled as be’s or bees) and never using regular morphology as in *I am.’ He presents the following illustrative set:

(10) a. Did you never read in the papers the way murdered men do bleed and drip? (Synge [1907] 1941: 129)
b. If I go in to meet a spark [‘electrician’], I do find a carpenter (Kallen 1989: 6)
c. He bes always joking (O’Neill 1947: 264)
d. She does be sitting there at nights watching Seven Days (Kallen 1989: 7)

One unsettled question on generic/habitual verb forms concerns the differentiations which can be made within sets such as (10). Semantic differences can be suggested – as between the recurrence of discrete events seen in (10b) versus more extended states of affairs as in (10d) – but existing evidence does not give us a clear pattern.

Kallen says that despite intimations that be forms are ‘more specifically associated with the Ulster dialect area’, it is attested in southern Irish counties including Dublin and neighbouring Meath in the east, Galway and Roscommon in the west, and Wexford in the southeast (albeit recessive). So the two forms’ relative geographical distribution is not as clear-cut as some sources say.

Moylan suggests that the usage is on the way out. I hope not.

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* It’s also worth noting the parallels with African-American Vernacular English; see for example Collins 2006 and Rickford 1999. AAVE do she be equates, I think, to HibE does she be. Both offer be’s/bees. Do be is definitely not available in standard English: Pollock 1989 (PDF), discussing so-called ‘do support’, explicitly contrasts John is not happy with *John does not be happy – but the Asterisk of Incorrectness would not apply in Ireland.

Red hair is strongly associated with Irish people on account of how common it is here. Less well known, at least outside the island, is that the Irish language has one word, rua, for the red of red hair and another word, dearg, for more prototypically red hues.*

Every language carves up the colour spectrum differently, and it can take children a while to figure it all out in the culture they happen to be raised in. Even as an adult I still discover nuances, one of which appears in Robert Bernen’s story ‘The Yellow Dog’ in his collection Tales from the Blue Stacks (1978).

The narrator is visiting a local farmer with a view to getting a sheep dog:

‘Is this the dog?, I asked.

His fur was that light rust or orange colour we talk of as red hair, and so often associate with Ireland. At home, in America, I would have called him a brown dog. Here in the Donegal hills, I found out later, he was a yellow dog. As I watched him squirming towards me, his belly so low to the ground it seemed as if he was almost afraid to stand at his real height, with that look in his eyes of hope filled with fear, I thought to myself, ‘At least he’ll be friendly.’

‘Will he make a good sheep dog?’ I asked.

‘The best,’ Mickey Paddy answered.

Whether this yellow–red distinction is still current in Donegal or in parts of it or elsewhere, I don’t know. Another story in the same book, ‘Joe’s Return’, contains an interesting dialect note. Joe, a neighbour, has spent 40 years working in an unspecified English city before returning to his Donegal homeland to finish his days on the old farm:

When he came back home he deliberately kept the marks of that other experience that set him off a little, raised him above the people he was born with. I thought of it as his ‘education’. Yet though Joe was conscious of the difference he never showed it in words. In fact he began using the oddest old pieces of the Donegal vocabulary, long discarded by all but the oldest people of the hills. ‘Forenenst,’ meaning ‘across from,’ was one he particularly liked. But when he had been around for a while his speech returned to normal.

Sadly, forenenst is the only ‘odd old piece’ of Donegalese mentioned. It’s a spelling variant not recorded in the OED, which has fornent and fornenst, citing their occasional use in Scotland and north England since the 16thC. Its fore- is the familiar prefix meaning ‘before’, joined to anenst, i.e. anent, meaning ‘in line with’ or ‘in front of’.

‘Danny’s Debts’, finally, has an example of be’s marking habitual aspect in Irish English, Spring be’s a long way off, while in ‘Brock’, a story from another collection, Bernen wrote a lovely passage about how every part of every hill in the landscape had a name in Irish.

Bernen was a New Yorker who taught classics at Harvard but in 1970 moved with his wife to rural Ireland to run a sheep farm in the hills of Donegal. Our national broadcaster RTÉ made a radio documentary about him which you can listen to here. The Blue Stacks in his book are the Cruacha Gorma mountains of Donegal, previously mentioned here.

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* See Foras na Gaeilge’s New English-Irish Dictionary for pronunciation and more.

Fooster is one of those words much loved in Hiberno-English but largely restricted to it, not having crossed to wider dialects as galore and smithereens did.* Derived from Irish fústar /’fuːst̪ər/, and alternatively spelt foosther to approximate Irish phonology, it has a meaning more easily described in general terms than precisely pinned down.

To fooster is to fiddle around or fuss with something. It’s a kind of agitated activity: busy but commonly aimless or inefficient. You can fooster with or over something, fooster around or about, or just fooster.

Curiously, there seems to be no associated Irish verb. Niall Ó Dónaill’s Irish-English dictionary translates fústar as ‘fuss, fidgetiness’ and fústaire as a ‘fussy, fidgety person’; fústráil is the act of fussing or fidgeting, while fústrach is the adjectival form.

Sometimes fooster has slightly pejorative connotations, implying mild disapproval: a parent or teacher might give out to a child for foostering. But the word is often emotionally neutral. It has broad appeal and is used in a wide range of ways (see below); Irish culture writer John Byrne called his blog Fústar in its honour.

Since being imported into Irish English – by Sheridan Le Fanu in 1847, says the OED – fooster has been inflected per English norms, giving rise for example to the adjective foostery. Fooster itself doubles as a noun form, but the gerund foostering is more usual in my experience. There’s a strong hint of phonaesthesia about all of these.

Here’s some literature showing different forms and contexts for the word. A few I’ve read; the others I found on Google Books:

What is he foostering over that change for? Sees me looking. Eye out for other fellow always. (James Joyce, Ulysses)

She foostered in her bag for the key. (Mary McCarthy, Remember Me)

All the while he contemplated the enterprise of his neighbours he was aware of Rose foostering at the new gas-cooker behind him. (Maura Treacy, Made in Heaven)

I fooster for an hour or more / not knowing what I am doing. (Paul Durcan, Christmas Day)

I hastily averted this smile, fearing it was too ghastly, and quickly foostered out a pack of cigarettes. (Flann O’Brien, Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn)

Well in any case he began to fooster around the house. (Flann O’Brien, Hair of the Dogma)

I let her fooster around with kettles and whatnot. (Marian Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close)

Kitty foostered about the office, unwilling to sit at her father’s place yet. (Pauline McLynn, Missing You Already)

My mother was foostering around dusting everything, whether it was dusty or not, the way that she did when she’d nothing else to keep her busy. (Gerard Whelan, War Children)

Thus, if Larry cleared a path through the snow-drift, or brought home the hen that had foosthered off with herself down the bog… (Jane Barlow, Irish Idylls)

A capable piece of work with full lips and plum-sleek hair, who was almost pretty as a girl but too foostery, too nervous, and was always outshone by the louder, gayer classmates who liked her in a pitying way. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light)

Mr. Sullivan slid into the car and foostered around under the seat trying to move it back from the steering wheel. (Kevin Holohan, The Brothers’ Lot)

…she foostered with the paper until Tom showed her how to fold it just so. (Patrician Scanlan, Two For Joy)

‘Holy Virgin, Saint Anthony, an’ Nebechadnaser,’ says the priest, tumblin’ his robe over his head wid the foosther he was in… (Sheridan Le Fanu, The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien)

He thrust in his no doubt grimy hand and foostered about and his fingers touched on something small and hard, and he gripped it, and pulled it out. (Sebastian Barry, Annie Dunne)

The caddy always seemed to be foostering as they headed for the first tee, and Harrington realized that foostering made him tense. (Henry Shefflin, The Autobiography)

Not only was Brando foostering around the with script but he was also displaying a curious inability to either learn or remember his lines. (Michael Sheridan and Anthony Galvin, A Man Called Harris: The Life of Richard Harris)

It seems even Marlon Brando was apt to fooster.

One last thing: malafooster (mallafooster, malafoosther, mollafoosdar, etc.) is a related Irish English word and means to give someone a serious beating. It comes from French mal ‘bad’ + fústar. Though heard less often than plain old fooster, it is used to reliably memorable effect.

Edit: A related word, common in northern counties, is footer or foother /’fuːt̪ər/, from Irish fútar. The Ulster-Scots Academy says to footer aboot is to ‘put the time in doing trivial tasks; fiddle and waste time, etc.’ and ties it to Old French foutre (h/t Fergus Kelly).

Share’s Slanguage and Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English gloss this word as implying clumsy or bungling activity, but there is clearly some overlap with foosther. John Lynch’s novel Red Sky in Morning has a couple of examples:

Well, for one, yer always futtering about with that dirty ribbon.

He walked to the firepit and futhered with his hands and he looked to the west…

See my archive of Hiberno-English posts for more along these lines.

*

* Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary notes the use of fooster in Cornwall but nowhere else outside Ireland.

In modern standard English, you as second person pronoun serves a multitude of purposes: singular and plural, subject and object, formal and informal. It wasn’t always so.

Centuries ago the language had singular thou and thee, plural ye and you. The numerical distinction then changed to one of register: thou and thee for familiar use and for speaking to children or people of lower social standing; ye and you for marking courtesy or respect.

Gradually ye and you shifted to the default position, supplanting thou and thee, which were marginalised to regional, religious, and archaic use. Then ye began to wane, for a variety of reasons, until you had taken centre stage as the pronoun of choice in singular and plural uses in all registers – but not all dialects.

Hiberno-English is one dialect where ye is found: I grew up using it in the west of Ireland, and I find it extremely useful. Ye behaves much like you: we have yeer ‘your’, yeers ‘yours’, ye’ll ‘you’ll’, ye’d ‘you’d’, ye’ve ‘you’ve’, ye’re ‘you’re’, and yeerselves ‘yourselves’ (all plural).

These are far more often spoken than written, so they’re less codified than the standard paradigm for you. But I would still consider ye’re ‘your’ in this Irish Examiner article an error (yere without the apostrophe is less wayward):

But we didn’t stop at ye. Alongside it there is yous, also spelled youse, you’s, youze and youz, and the more fronted yez, yehs, yiz, yeez, yees, ye’s, yeeze, etc. One reason there are so many is that the vowel is often unstressed (and thus orthographically opaque). But speak to people from around the island and you’ll hear different vowel sounds, even from the same speaker depending on the word’s environment.

It helps to think of these in two main sets: ye and youse. Or perhaps three: ye, youse, and yiz – this is the system preferred by Raymond Hickey (PDF). In my own speech I favour ye, but I use all three types. Ye is a Germanic holdover, but youse appears to be an Irish innovation. T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English comments on its emergence:

From the time large numbers of Irish people became exposed to English, in the late 16th century and onwards, the ‘you’ form was therefore the normal form of address to a single person. As regards the verbal forms, there is evidence that in the 17th and 18th centuries some people tried to distinguish between singular and plural by making changes in the verb: we thus find ‘you is’ and ‘you are’; but this useful device was abandoned in the interests of so-called purity of language. Confronted with this bewildering volatility in the use and formation of the second-person pronoun, it would appear that Irish speakers of English decided to distinguish singular from plural by attaching the plural signal s to the singular ‘you’, on the analogy of regular pluralisations . . .

Ye and the y_z forms are not evenly distributed. Jeffrey Kallen’s Irish English (vol. 2) notes a significant discrepancy between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Treating yous(e), yez, yowz and yiz as a single group, ye as another, he searched the ICE-Ireland corpus and found 52 youse in NI, 18 in ROI, and 40 ye in ROI and none at all in NI.

While ye is inflected as yeer in the possessive case, youse/yiz may be realised as the remarkable yizzer or yisser. Here it is in use:

‘I’ll book the airport chapel where Lorna and the rest of youse can do yizzer praying for a few minutes, but that’s the end of it.’ (Deirdre Purcell, The Winter Gathering)

‘Why ardent yiz weerdin yisser bleaten c…c…collars.’ [Why aren’t you wearing your bleedin’ collars] (Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, Downturn Abbey)

And a few versions of youse/yiz:

‘Howlt on there, youze,’ said the C.G. (Samuel Beckett, Murphy)

‘I’d say it’d be as well for yeez both if he wasn’t found here.’ – Jennifer Johnston, How Many Miles to Babylon?

‘Are yous goin’ to put on th’ gramophone to-night, or are yous not?’ (Seán O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock)

‘From now on yiz can collect yer letters at the post office.’ (Ferdia Mac Anna, The Last of the High Kings)

Ye and yeer:

Did ye practise yere piano pieces? her mother asks. (Mary Costello, ‘You Fill Up My Senses’, in The China Factory)

‘That’s all yeers, and here’s mine.’ (Seán Ó Faoláin, ‘The Talking Trees’)

‘Have ye no business of yeer own to mind without nosing round here?’ (Frank O’Connor, The Holy Door)

When she left, Malachy kept saying, Will ye mind yeerselves, will ye? (Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes)

And both at once, in Paul Lynch’s Red Sky in Morning:

You’re right. Evicting youse is pure wrong. But if Faller sees ye lumping about – there’s fuck all you can do. […]

Faller and his boys will be over to yous later. Ye know how it is.

Dialects that exclude ye as a normal pronoun still retain it in several niches: fossilised expressions like ye gods and hear ye; biblical sayings like Oh ye of little faith and Judge not, that ye be not judged; old poetry like Gather ye rosebuds while ye may; and old hymns like O Come All Ye Faithful and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.

The spread of you to dominate the pronominal paradigm in English simplified things, but at the cost of nuance and occasionally clarity. The prevalence and popularity of alternatives – to the Irish list we can add y’all, ye aw, you’uns, yinz, yunz, yupela, and others from the US and elsewhere – suggest that people have found the deficit unsatisfactory.

Update:

I asked on Twitter what second-person plural pronouns people used (and their dialect). All the replies can be read here.

Guy has followed an improbable path from its origin as an eponym for Guy Fawkes to its common and versatile use today. It’s increasingly popular as a term to address mixed-gender and all-female groups, but not everyone welcomes this development (see video below). So how gender-neutral is guys, you guys?

Instead of a simple answer there’s a spectrum that depends heavily on context. But we can draw some general conclusions, as I did in an article at Slate’s Lexicon Valley on guy(s) as a gender-neutral word:

Addresses like Hey guys or just Guys are widely felt to be gender-neutral; set phrases like good guys are less so; usages like those guys shift even more subtly male-ward; singular a guy and the guy are markedly male. Then we have the likes of a guy thing and guys and dolls, which explicitly contrast guys to the female gender (and belie the fact that many people identify as neither).

Even among the more male uses of guy – singular rather than plural, and in reference rather than address – change is occurring. My article shares intriguing examples of this shift, from both children and adults, then ponders the future of gender-neutral guy(s).

Guy is absent from Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s Words and Women, their Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing (except for a passing mention that it’s ‘being debated’), and Jane Mills’s Womanwords: perhaps strangely so, given its profile. In 1980 George Jochnowitz called the shift in the use of guys ‘extraordinary’ and later described it as ‘the only major change in the pronominal system of English . . . since the loss of thou and thee four centuries ago’ (h/t Manu Saunders).

The ‘American’ uses of guys and you guys are prevalent in Ireland but must compete with other options. Irish English lads has a similar pattern to guys, often used to address mixed groups. (There’s also Ah lads as an expression of general discombobulation.) And of course we have ye, youse, yiz and the like. But guys is holding its own.

For more on gender-neutral guys, see Julia Evans’s survey, discussions at Language Log, Language Hat, and language: a feminist guide, and further links in my Slate article.

A characteristic feature of English grammar in Ireland is the so-called after perfect, also known as the hot news perfect or the immediate perfective. Popular throughout Ireland yet unfamiliar to most users of English elsewhere, it’s an idiosyncratic structure that emerged by calquing Irish grammar onto English. It has also undergone some curious changes over time.

The after perfect normally expresses perfect tense, using after to indicate that something occurred in the recent or immediate past, relative to the time of speaking or reference. It uses a form of the verb be, followed by after, then usually a verb in the progressive tense. BE + AFTER + [VERB]ING. I’m after meeting them means I met them a short time ago.

So I’m after summarising the after perfect. Now for some detail.

Past tense be-forms work too, so the after perfect can correspond to the past perfect (aka pluperfect). Instead of We had just arrived, an Irish person may say We were just after arriving. Just, only, and only just are often added to stress recency: We’re just after eating means we finished eating just moments ago. Be after can also license a noun phrase: Let her rest – she’s only after a swim. Or: I’ve no room for dessert yet – I’m just after dinner.

Robert Burchfield’s Modern English Usage, rare for a usage guide, has an entry on the construction, describing it as ‘unknown’ outside what he calls Anglo-Irish. P.W. Joyce, in English As We Speak It In Ireland, writes that neither present nor past tense form ‘would be understood by an Englishman, although they are universal in Ireland, even among the higher and educated classes’. Note, though, that modern sources label it informal.

I said that it comes from Irish: on this point linguists are agreed. This is because the language has no direct equivalent of have. Translating I have just done it into Irish involves be and one of several phrases meaning after, e.g.: Tá mé tar éis é a dhéanamh, or Tá mé i ndiaidh é a dhéanamh, both of which literally mean I am after doing it. (The underlined phrases mean after, as do iar and a haithle.)

Here are a few examples of the after perfect I’ve come across in Irish literature:

‘I’m after being in at the mart and the price of sheep is a holy scandal.’ (Claire Keegan, ‘Men and Women’, in Antarctica)

If we were after having some wet weather the earth would be damp and clammy, clinging to boots, knees and hands. (Alice Taylor, To School Through the Fields)

It’s after upsetting him more than anything ever upset him before in all our lives. (Donal Ryan, The Thing About December)

I shuddered when the shadow fell over me. Hickey laughed, his breath a white plume on the chilly air. ‘Is someone after walking across your grave?’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)

‘When you get a bit of heat at all like the heat we’re after getting today,’ he said, ‘the man below do be swimmin’ in his own melt.’ (Kevin Barry, ‘White Hitachi’, in Dark Lies the Island)

A small stone circle (c.1200 BC) I’m after seeing near Woodford in south Galway. Not pictured: two skittish deer that bounded away without delay.

About those changes I mentioned. In contemporary Irish English, the after perfect nearly always refers to recent events (or recent relative to the point of reference). But centuries ago it commonly referred to the future, e.g. ‘[my heart] will be after breaking outright’ for ‘will break’. Even Irish people who use the idiom routinely may not know this; none that I asked did.

The switch from future to past reference occurred over the 18th and 19th centuries, following patterns in Irish, resulting in what Ailbhe Ó Corráin calls a ‘profound functional shift’ in his detailed historical discussion ‘On the “After Perfect” in Irish and Hiberno-English’ (PDF). He describes a wide range of types and uses of the after perfect, and shows how:

the various functions assignable to the early Hiberno-English AFP [after perfect] may be derived from attestable uses in earlier stages of Irish. . . . What is particularly remarkable is that the evolution of the AFP in Irish (now with tar éis, i ndiaidh) is mirrored by the evolution of the AFP in HE.

Jeffrey Kallen, in his paper ‘The English language in Ireland’ (PDF), has helpful insights into the after perfect’s extended uses and pragmatic functions in modern Hiberno-English:

Speech act status and social closeness have a role to play in uses of the after perfect, since after perfects frequently occur in situations where the speaker draws attention to an event that is known to the listener but which forms the focus of chastisement, e.g. You’re after breakin the gate!. O’Keeffe and Amador Moreno (2009) similarly emphasise the function of ‘scolding’, including ‘self-inflicted or self-deprecating’ utterances with the after perfect.

He argues that the ‘chastising and self-critical’ uses of the after perfect in Hiberno-English ‘would not have the same pragmatic effect if rendered with the regular English have perfect’.

As with other Hiberno-English features, such as amn’t and haitch, the after perfect is subject to occasional censure. Years ago, on her Irish Times arts blog, Fiona McCann wrote: ‘Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is after winning the Booker prize’. A reader, Mimi, queried the idiom, Fiona explained it, but Mimi was unimpressed: ‘As I thought then, grammatically incorrect! . . . sounds a bit “Irish” to me’. Wrote the Irish Times reader.

Lest there be any uncertainty: the after perfect is grammatically impeccable, though not standard English. Every dialect has its own grammar, none more correct or advanced than any other. Standard English is one such dialect, socially privileged but not linguistically superior. People are often confused on this point, and may use grammar as a pretext for expressing suspicion or dislike of a group of people.

But I’m after getting sidetracked.

You may have noticed the potential for ambiguity. The peculiarly Hiberno-English use of after can produce phrases that are legitimate in standard English but carry a different meaning: where after conveys the idea of wanting or seeking something. Reader Adrian Morgan reports an example he overheard in Australia, while T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English quotes one from George Birmingham’s The Lighter Side of Irish Life (1912):

An Englishman who had settled in Ireland once related to me a conversation which he had with an Irish servant. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘will you please light the fire in my study?’ ‘I’m just after lighting it,’ she replied. ‘Then do it at once,’ he said. ‘Don’t I tell you, sir,’ she said, ‘that I’m just after doing it?’

Nor is it just anecdotal. Shane Walshe’s Irish English as Represented in Film cites a study by Harris (1982) in which groups of native HibE speakers and native BrE speakers were asked the meaning of the line I’m after getting a cup of tea. 143 out of 145 of the Irish English group understood it to mean the person had just got a cup of tea; 51 of 63 BrE speakers understood it as an expression of desire for a cuppa.

Speaking of which, I’m after making a fresh pot. Is anyone after a cup, in either sense?

Up to your oxters (or my oxters, etc.) is a phrase I often heard growing up in County Mayo in Ireland. Oxter means ‘armpit’, normally, so up to your oxters means ‘up to your armpits’ – whether literally or figuratively. You could be up to your oxters in a river or in housework.

The word is used in dialects in Ireland, Scotland, England, and the Isle of Man, apparently. As well as signifying the armpit, it can refer to the underside of the upper arm more generally, to the fold of the arm when bent against the body, and to the armhole of a coat or jacket.

Oxter also has various verb senses. The OED lists these as: ‘to support by the arm, walk arm in arm with; to take or carry under the arm; to embrace, put one’s arm around’. It dates the earliest example to Robert Burns in 1796: ‘The Priest he was oxter’d, the Clerk he was carried.’ The noun is centuries older.

Tall grass up to your oxters, at Irish Seed Savers in Scariff, County Clare

The etymology of oxter is surprisingly complicated but is of clearly Germanic cast. From the OED:

Apparently a variant (perhaps after an early Scandinavian cognate: see below) of an unattested Middle English reflex of Old English ōxta, ōhsta (earlier ōcusta ) < a suffixed form of the Germanic base of Old Saxon ōhasa, Old High German uohasa, uohhisa (Middle High German uohse, üehse; compare with different suffixation Old English ōxn, Old High German uohsana, uohsina, and also Germanic forms cited s.v. okselle n.) < an ablaut variant of the Germanic base of ax n. The -r of the final syllable is difficult to explain; perhaps compare Norwegian regional oster (feminine; now rare) the throat, the hollow above the collarbone, alongside Old Icelandic óstr, masculine (Icelandic hóstur; also hóst, óst, feminine or neuter), Faroese óstur, neuter, all in the same sense.

Naturally there are variant spellings – several dozen, over the centuries – but it’s almost always oxter I see, or oxther to reflect colloquial Irish usage. Pronunciation depends on geography, with the OED suggesting British /ˈɒkstə/, US /ˈɑkstər/, Scottish /ˈɔkstər/, and Irish /ˈɑksθər/ or /ˈɑkʃθər/.

Most major dictionaries include the word, but with little detail. Oxford Dictionaries and Random House, seemingly unaware of the existence of Ireland, label it Scottish and northern English only. Its absence from the American Heritage Dictionary suggests minimal if any use in the US; nor does it feature in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, which often has Irishisms that went west over the Atlantic.

The sole example in COCA is from Diana Gabaldon’s novel Dragonfly in Amber:

He turned his head and sniffed suspiciously at the soft tuft of cinnamon under his raised arm. ‘Christ!’ he said. He tried to push me away. ‘Ye dinna want to put your head near my oxter, Sassenach. I smell like a boar that’s been dead a week.’ ‘And pickled in brandy after,’ I agreed, snuggling closer.

Collins notes the connection to Old High German Ahsala and Latin axilla. The latter – a diminutive form of ala, the wing of a bird – remains in use as an anatomical term. Oxter is also ‘akin to Old English eax axis, axle’, according to Merriam-Webster – the arm, after all, rotates around an axis. Hiberno-English also has Irish ascaill ‘armpit’ and the derived term asclán ‘armful, amount carried under the arm’.

Oxter shows up in literature, both modern and centuries old, often of a Gaelic bent. Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Vitruviana’, from Electric Light, uses the derived verb oxtercog, which means to support someone under the armpits:

In the deep pool at Portstewart, I waded in
Up to the chest, then stood there half-suspended
Like Vitruvian man, both legs wide apart,
Both arms out buoyant to the fingertips,
Oxter-cogged on water.

This grace-lit scene offsets the more typical use of oxtercog in contexts where someone is supported manually (or half-dragged or half-carried) because they’re the worse for wear through injury or drink, or because they’ve been apprehended by police:

At Dunkirk he was ordered from the ambulance by military policemen and had to be ‘oxter-cogged along’ until he got to the pier. (Richard Doherty, Irish Men and Women in the Second World War)

He tried to oxtercog the man, but Ronald’s legs dragging helplessly slowed their progress. (Patrick Taylor, An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War)

Oxter the verb operates similarly:

About the last thing I can remember is Cleary oxtering Kreuger out the bar door. (Patrick Boyle, At Night All Cats Are Grey)

At the water’s edge you took me by one elbow, Conor took me by the other, and between the two of you, you oxtered me in over the rippled sand until the water licked my ankles. (Bernie McGill, The Butterfly Cabinet)

Joyce included the noun in its literal sense in Dubliners (‘Many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf under his oxter’) and in Ulysses (‘And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter’); it appears also in Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (‘You can take the sammin [salmon] under your oxther’) and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (‘You could have ten acres of land with strawberry jam spread on it to the height of your two oxters.’)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang includes the term oxterful ‘as much as one can carry beneath an armpit’, citing James Hogg’s The Wool-Gatherer (1818): ‘Gang after your braw gallant, wi’ your oxterfu’ ket.’ The English Dialect Dictionary adds oxter-bound ‘stiff in the arm and shoulder’, oxter-deep ‘up to the armpits’, oxter-hole ‘the arm-hole of a waistcoat’, oxter-pocket, oxter-pouch ‘breast-pocket’, and oxter-staff ‘crutch’.

It was used in an array of idioms too. To come with the crooked oxter is to bring someone a gift (or in a marital context, to bring a good dowry); to feel a thing in one’s oxter is to have it hidden under one’s arm; to have your head under your oxter is to walk with a downcast head; and to give a person an oxter is to lend them an arm in walking. I’ve heard only the last of these in the wild.

What prompted this post was an encounter with the word in Selina Guinness’s fine memoir The Crocodile by the Door: The Story of a House, a Farm and a Family (Penguin, 2012). It uses oxter in the up to your oxters expression I’m most familiar with, but in the singular:

It all seemed so straightforward yesterday. Our neighbour Pádraig – who got out of sheep after he’d figured that, if it took 6.66 sheep to make up one livestock unit, he’d be tending twenty-six and a half hoofs for the four of a suckler cow – arrived mid-morning with gates and hurdles from his own farm. ‘There’s some work in sheep,’ he said, before urging Colin down through the gusting rain to the yard to set up a sheep race – a corridor of fences in which the ewes can be queued and inspected individually. It had been his idea to hire the scanner. ‘I know Joe didn’t hold with it but, Jesus, if you’re lambing for the first time you don’t want to be in up to your oxter counting feet.’

Browsing Twitter for contemporary colloquial examples, I see oxters in common enough use. On the literal front the phrase legs up to her oxters is repeated, as are references to sweat, smell, and shaving.

In an idiomatic vein it’s often used in the up to your oxters formula: people describe being up to their oxters in meetings, bribes, pollen, work, debt, dust, mud, scandal, hipsters, etc. – usually negative things, but the word itself has a fun, satisfying sound absent from the more familiar armpit.

The adjective fierce has a range of overlapping meanings that convey aggression, savagery, intensity, and so on (fierce dog/battle/debate/storm), reflecting its origin in Latin ferus ‘wild, untamed’. In modern use its connotations are often negative or neutral, but it can also modify positive qualities (fierce loyalty/passion/strength).

Fierce leads a different sort of life in colloquial Irish English, where we put it to adverbial use as an intensifier, like very. I could say it’s fierce mild out, or that someone is fierce generous or fierce polite. The seeming paradox of these phrases is apparent to me only upon reflection; they come naturally to speakers of Hiberno-English.

Here are some examples from Twitter and boards.ie:

Fierce dark this morning

I was having a fierce stressful day at work

That sounds like a fierce good idea

We find the bales fierce handy

Fierce soft penalty

I’m fierce biased for phonetics

Is boards fierce slow today or is it just me

Not that fierce far from me actually

This is some fierce fancy porridge!

They can smell fierce mouldy if there isn’t good circulation

We’re fierce patriotic on the northside!

It lends the phrase fierce Irish a nice ambiguity (image source).

Fierce in Irish English can also work as an intensifying adjective, modifying a noun. It can have a positive meaning, like great, tremendous, abundant; a more negative one, like severe, terrible, awful; or somewhere between them and pointing either way, like intense:

That was a fierce commute

Dublin is still fierce craic at 5am

There’s a fierce amount of Liverpool fans in Ireland

We used have fierce problems with all FM radio reception

Normal paintball is a fierce load of hassle

There was fierce drying to be done today in the heat

Fierce men for the horn these Rathkeale lads [i.e., they blow the car horn a lot]

Anyone I’ve spoken to is delighted you guys are in town so there should be a fierce crowd

To clarify: a fierce crowd in Ireland is not an angry mob but simply a large crowd. And here are both uses of fierce, one after the other:

Jaysus lads…i felt fierce bad all day, i’m not a kebab eater, the very odd time. Had a fierce time getting to sleep, chills and sweat pouring out me.

Fierce bad = very bad; a fierce time = an awful time, a difficult time. The adjectival use also occurs predicatively:

The condensation is fierce and it’s creating mold

In France, it was hot and sunny. It was fierce.

The shade is fierce over here [shade here is slang for criticism]

Search boards.ie and you’ll get a sense of just how common and broad these usages are. The versatility in the semantics and polarity of fierce in Irish English contrasts strongly with standard English, where connotations of combat and ferocity predominate – as we see in the top 20 fierce X collocations in COCA:

Other corpora offer similar sets, adding terms like rivalry, attack, struggle, and anger.

Some time ago I asked about Irish English fierce on Twitter and got some fierce interesting replies.

For example: Journalist Kathy Foley wrote a piece quoting an Irish B&B owner who called some guests ‘fierce dirty people’ (i.e., very dirty). Her British sub-editor, taking fierce to be another adjective instead of an intensifying adverb, added a comma between them (fierce, dirty people) and inadvertently changed the meaning.

Gerard Cunningham noted the parallel with wild (also wil’ or wile), another intensifier in Irish English (particularly in northern counties), and offered the example ‘those lions are wild tame’. Loreto Todd (in Words Apart: A Dictionary of Northern Ireland English, cited in Bernard Share’s Slanguage) reports the same improbable collocation: ‘That bull’s wild tame.’ Fierce tame is likewise perfectly plausible.

The set adverbial phrase something fierce is also worth noting, as it has the same emphatic effect:

Jaysus you’d miss EP something fierce

These days are dragging something fierce

The wind has been blowing something fierce over the last few days

Hozier just reminds me of Chris O Dowd something fierce

This construction features in other dialects, including US English and Canadian English. Robert Chapman’s Dictionary of American Slang says something fierce and something awful are ‘slang or dialect relics of the adverbial use of something attested from the early 1500s.’

Finally, there’s a slang use of fierce (adj.) ‘great’, ‘very attractive’, etc. often applied to someone’s appearance or fashion. Though depicted as gay slang in Curb Your Enthusiasm, it’s not used solely in that domain. It may coincide with sense 3 in GDoS: ‘a general adj. of approval: excellent, wonderful, first-rate [on bad = good model]’.

Browsing Twitter for examples, I saw this usage – or what looked like it – a few times:

Freckles are fierce!

My fashion students are fierce!!!

Looking fierce on Cutting Edge tonight

It’s fierce right? They’re a want-it-all kind of thing [referring to sunglasses]

Though they may be small, they are fierce! [referring to jewellery]

Recording our Joan Crawford episode tomorrow […] It’s gonna be fierce

The characteristically Irish uses of fierce seem restricted to the dialect – and within it, to its vernacular registers. They receive no coverage in the OED or other major dictionaries, unless I’ve missed it. Wiktionary has a brief entry on a couple of the Irish uses, but that’s about it.

Intensifiers vary considerably between different varieties of English; witness bare, dead, hella, horrid, proper, plumb, pure, right, super, wicked. Informal ones rise and sometimes fall – and dialectal ones thrive in their native groups – without ever entering the standard tongue. To do so would, in a way, spoil their niche appeal: and so it is with fierce. It’s a strong marker of the Irish idiom, and I’m fierce partial to it.

Irish people are known for having a way with words. Sometimes it’s true and sometimes it isn’t, but either way we first need the words to have a chance of having our way with them. And some words, like amn’t and fooster, are distinctive and beloved features of the dialect.

The post title exaggerates a little: by words I mean words or usages, and some of the items below appear in other dialects too. But all are characteristic of Irish English (aka Hiberno-English), whether integral to its grammar or produced on occasions of unalloyed Irishness.

Each entry links to a blog post all about the word or usage in question, so click through if you want more detail on pronunciation, etymology, examples, variations, and so on. Off we go:

*

1. Plámás is an Irish word borrowed into Irish English meaning ‘empty flattery or wheedling’. It’s sometimes used witheringly in reference to political speech, for some reason.

2. Sleeveen is more strongly political, a scathing phonosemantic word for a sly, smooth-tongued operator who will say anything to advance their private agenda. Again it’s from Irish, anglicised from slíbhín.

3. Amn’t, short for am not, is a national grammatical treasure. Though criticised by prescriptivists, it’s common throughout Ireland, and, in interrogative syntax, is more logical than the standard but irregular aren’t I.

4. Notions in Ireland means either amorous behaviour, sexual inclinations; or pretentious affectation, ideas above one’s station. Pray that you interpret it right if you hear it.

5. Fooster (often foosther to evoke vernacular pronunciation) is a verb denoting fiddling or fidgeting, a kind of busy activity that is aimless or inefficient. You can stop foostering around now in search of an unsatisfying synonym.

Hills and cows in County Clare

6. Bulling – to be bulling is to be visibly mad or raging, while to be bulling to do something is to be very eager, i.e., mad keen. It probably came from Irish buile and was then reinforced by imagery of bulls.

7. Oxter means armpit. It can be literal or figurative, and is often used idiomatically to say you’re up to your oxters in something unpleasant, like paperwork. An old Germanic word, it survives in a few dialects in this part of the world.

8. Fierce has an additional life in Ireland as an intensifying adverb – like very – or as an intensifying adjective. Irish people are fierce fond of it, and the results can be striking to outsiders: fierce gentle, fierce drying out.

9. Till is used in Irish English to mean ‘in order that’ or ‘so that [someone] can’. ‘Where is he till I murder him?,’ James Joyce wrote in Ulysses. An Irish person with a story to tell may begin, ‘Come here till I tell you’, which means attention (and probably not physical movement) is required.

10. Feck has various meanings – including, as a verb, ‘to steal’ and ‘to throw’. But it’s best known as a versatile minced oath, popularised by Father Ted among others. It has a surprising etymology.

11. Cnáimhseáil, anglicised as cnawvshawl, knauvshaul, etc., means complaining or grumbling. It alludes to the activity of the jawbone (cnámh is Irish for bone), while also functioning onomatopoeically.

12. The after perfect is a grammatical construction common in Irish English but virtually unheard of elsewhere. It’s used for recent events: They’re after leaving = ‘They’ve just left’, which is why it’s also called the hot news perfect. It emerged from Irish grammar.

*

This is part 2 in an occasional series. The first instalment, ‘10 words used only in Irish English’, features smacht, moryah, give out, asthore, hames, cat, yoke, thick, and acushla machree (which counts as two). Got a suggestion? I’ll listen to requests delivered with plámás.

Passing through the pleasingly named town of Gort on my way to the Burren recently, I popped in to a second-hand bookshop and picked up a couple of Brian Moore books I hadn’t read: Catholics and The Doctor’s Wife. Everything I’ve read by Moore has been time well spent, yet most people I ask have not read him, and many have not heard of him.

Catholics (1972) is more novella than novel, around 80 pages long in my Penguin paperback edition. Work won’t allow a single-sitting read today, so I’m taking bites from it on my breaks. The title is straightforwardly descriptive: a young American priest is sent from Rome to a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, where old and new Catholicism square up against each another.

The young priest, Kinsella, has just landed on the island – the first time it hosted a helicopter – and meets with the presiding Abbot in a large parlour. Sitting on rough furniture carved by the local monks, with Atlantic light streaming in through a 13th-century window, they enact a ritual within rituals:

Kinsella smiled and carefully handed back the seal. The Abbot shut it in the tin box. ‘Cup of tea?’

‘Oh, no thanks.’

Irishly, the Abbot appraised this and, Irishly, decided the denial was mere politeness. ‘Ah, you will!’ the Abbot said. He called downstairs. ‘Brother Martin?’

‘Aye.’

‘Bring us a cup of tea, will you?’

‘Two teas,’ Martin’s voice rumbled from below.

That response Ah, you will!, and variations like Ah, go on and Sure you might as well and Would you not have a drop are so Irish that they have passed into parody – thanks in part to Mrs Doyle of Father Ted fame:

(Father Jack makes liberal use of the Irish minced oath feck in that clip; I wrote about its use and origins here.)

Also of interest in the excerpt above is the unusual adverb Irishly, which does a lot of work in Moore’s narrative commentary. It doesn’t appear in many dictionaries; Merriam-Webster defines it as ‘in a manner characteristic of the Irish’, while the OED extends this to encompass one salient aspect of Irishness:

In a manner characteristic or reminiscent of Ireland or the Irish. Also occas.: in a seemingly contradictory fashion.

Declining a cup of tea when really you’d like one (you may even ‘murder a cup’) certainly qualifies as Irishly contradictory – as does Mrs Doyle’s marvellous deployment of You won’t have a cup as another way of insisting on a cup.