Sometimes we use language to talk about something without referring to it directly – for fear of flouting social or moral convention, for fear of the thing itself, to conceal and deceive, and so on. In everyday discourse much of this falls under politeness and pragmatics: certain domains are taboo to whatever degree, so we employ euphemisms to avoid crossing a line of what is considered appropriate in the context.

The last time I wrote about euphemisms on Sentence first, it was to share commentary in Molly Keane’s novel Good Behaviour on the many ways to refer to the toilet without mentioning the toilet or even the bathroom.

In Loving and Giving, another bittersweet comic gem by Keane, the area of taboo avoidance is the middle anatomy. The novel follows an Irish girl, Nicandra (named by her father after a beloved horse), who is eight years old when we first meet her. Her Aunt Tossie lives in the big house with them, and Nicandra goes to her room one morning:

Her nightdress was nothing like as pretty as Maman’s, no lace, only broderie anglaise the same as edged Nicandra’s drawers (“knickers” was a common word, not to be used. For the same reason, if you had a pain it was in “your little inside”, not in your stomach – and there were no words beyond “down there” to describe any itch or ailment in the lower parts of your body).

A little later we see the same phrase not mentioned but used – and not of a person but an animal. Nicandra is running an errand for Aunt Tossie and passes by the open pantry door, where she can see Twomey, the butler, shaving:

She watched the rhythmic strokes of the razor for a moment, then turned her attention to Twomey’s own cat which was miaowing and writhing uncomfortably in the wooden wine case which was her quiet bed.

“What’s wrong with Patsy-Pudding, Twomey?” she asked. “I think she has a nasty pain in her little inside.” She peered closer. “Oh, Twomey, Twomey, she has a kitten in her box.”

The final excerpt has both use and mention, and discussion besides. Nicandra is having tea with Nannie (‘not really Nannie … more Maman’s maid, and mender of everything in the house’):

Nannie was a tiny little woman. When she sat in a chair her feet didn’t meet the ground; they swung about, kicking under her long grey skirt. Tonight her eyes were red as two fire holes in her face.

“Have you got a headache like Twomey?” Nicandra asked, hopeful that Nannie would observe her kindly anxiety.

“I have nothing like Mr Twomey, I’m glad to say.” There was an acid note in Nannie’s reply. “Only my stomach is cramped up under my arms with pain. Run along now and don’t ask questions – and don’t worry your father with silly questions either.”

For Nannie to use the word “stomach” instead of “little inside” was an infringement of the rules for polite talk. If she told Dada about Nannie’s complaints, she herself would certainly say “inside”, perhaps “little inside”, as Nannie was smaller than any grown-up person she knew.

Before reading Molly Keane, I’d never heard the Victorian-flavoured little inside. I was familiar with stomach, tummy, tum, tum-tum, belly, middle, gut (and, in jocular use, breadbasket). Growing up, I normally used tummy – originally a nursery form – and had stomach on standby for more formal or grown-up contexts. Belly, I learned, was considered a bit vulgar, though I still used it every now and then.

The OED offers inner man and inner woman as humorous, mid-19C phrases for the stomach (‘With my inner man well refreshed with auk-livers, I was soon asleep’ – Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations, 1856), extended from the same phrase used for a millennium to refer to one’s ‘inner or spiritual part; the soul or mind’.

A whole litany of substitutes for stomach are listed in The Book of Euphemisms by Judith Neaman and Carole Silver. They say Mary or Little Mary is a ‘British personification of the stomach’ used in expressions like I’m willing, but Mary isn’t ‘to indicate the stomach’s rejection of an eater’s urge’, and propose an origin in James Barrie’s 1903 play Little Mary. They continue:

The tummy is most often euphemistically compared to parts of a house; thus it is called the balcony, the bay window, the basement, the false front, the front exposure, the frontage, the front porch, and the kitchen. Creating analogies between the stomach’s shape and function and household items, people refer to it as the bag, the basket, the bread basket, the dinner basket, the dinner pail, the pot, the feedbox, the feedbag, the grublocker (or locker), the furnace tank, and, more generally, the cavity and the midsection.

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Keane’s Loving and Giving, which I featured in a bookmash last year, contains a couple of other linguistic items of passing interest. The line ‘Come on till we see did it come’ demonstrates a characteristically Irish English use of till, while the following exchange has a popular Irish idiom of exaggeration:

“You must be cold,” Nicandra insisted. She had found someone to pity. “Don’t you want a cup of tea?”

“I’m only killed from tea.” Nicandra recognized a raffish, twinkling suggestion that something stronger might be acceptable.

This thread on Twitter, which begins with a Guardian article by the great editor Diana Athill on her friendship with Molly Keane, has more lines and excerpts from Loving and Giving and also Time After Time (‘Her voice salvaged the wreckage of her beauty’).

Addendum: The book I’ve just begun reading, Dangerous Fictions by Ita Daly, addresses euphemism in its first few pages. Louisa (aged 19) is complaining to her mother, Martina, about her grandmother, whose drinking affects her bladder control:

‘Get her to change her knickers, why can’t you,’ was Louisa’s final remark this morning. ‘I mean, the way you go on about my friends and they only smell of sex, not piss.’

This was meant to shock and it did. It was the brutality of the language rather than the thoughts expressed. ‘Knickers’, ‘sex’, ‘piss’, were all words which made Martina flinch. She would find euphemisms for them even as she laughed shamefacedly at her own squeamishness. She found the expression ‘making love’ particularly silly, and yet she would use it as the only acceptable way of describing the act of copulation.

‘Middle-class mealy-mouthedness,’ her husband and daughter would shout derisively – and they would be right. She was stuck with it , though …

What words have you used, or heard used, to refer to the stomach?

In a comment on my post about 12 Irish English usages, Margaret suggested that I write about the Irish expression on foot of. It was a good idea: the phrase is not widely known outside Ireland and is therefore liable to cause confusion, if this exchange is any indication.

On foot of means ‘because of’, ‘as a result of’, or ‘on the basis of’. T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers the example sentences ‘On foot of this, we can’t go any further with this deal’ and ‘On foot of the charges, he had to appear in the court’.

These lines suggest it’s a formal phrase, and that’s invariably how I see it used; I’ve yet to hear it in everyday conversation. A search on Google News shows that it’s common in crime reporting in Ireland. I also see it in academic and business prose, an impression confirmed by the example sentences in Oxford Dictionaries, e.g.:

Further decisions could be taken on foot of that, he said.

It was on foot of one of these monthly reviews that the decision to close the nursery was taken in August.

A spokesperson for the site said they were very disappointed that on foot of legal advice they had to shut the service down.

A search for the phrase on IrishTimes.com or IrishExaminer.com returns thousands of hits, including in headlines. Here’s a couple:

By contrast, a search for on foot of on the TheGuardian.com returns just 146 hits, many of them false positives (‘a journey on foot of 26 miles’) or quoting Irish sources.

The OED labels the usage Irish English and stresses its jurisprudential use, defining it as: ‘consequent and in conformance to (a legal judgment, decision, etc.); on the basis of’. It dates it to 1818 and says the phrase derives from foot in the sense footing, as in on an equal footing.

On foot of all that, I need say no more about it.

Growing up in rural Ireland, I regularly heard – and still occasionally hear – some version of the phrase the cut of someone. It’s an informal idiom that means the state or appearance of someone and usually incorporates criticism or amusement or both. Here’s an example I just read in Deirdre Madden’s novel Nothing Is Black:

‘Look at the cut of me!’ Claire’s mother had said the last time she’d visited her. She’d been sitting by a mirror, combing out her faded hair. ‘I’m as grey as a badger. How come I look so old, yet I feel no different to what I was forty years ago? Where’s the sense in that?’ She’d started to laugh …

In Irish literature the expression is generally found in dialogue or in vernacular narrative. Madden’s example is typical in a few ways: it’s light-hearted, colloquial, and deprecatory – in this case self-deprecatory. In a similar vein, the next two examples involve mirrors. Marian Keyes, Anybody Out There:

She got a little compact from her bag, then held the mirror between her legs, but couldn’t see over her bump.

‘Feck.’ Then she looked at her face. ‘Look at the cut of me, I’m all red and shiny.’

She combed her hair, refreshed her lipstick and powdered her red cheeks. ‘Who knew labour was so unflattering?’

Martha Long, Run, Lily, Run:

‘Oh would you look at the cut of me?! The hair is nearly gone from me head it’s tha thin, an Jesus! Would ye look at the grey?!’

Self-referral is far from the only way of using it. Here’s third-person reference, in Seán Ó Faoláin’s Collected Stories:

When he got home his father rushed at him and shouted at him to know where the blazes he had been, and his mother was crying, but when they saw the cut of him they stopped. His mummy and the maid got a hot bath ready for him …

And second-person reference in Pauline McLynn’s The Woman on the Bus:

‘Ah, Tom,’ her mother was saying. ‘Would you look at the cut of you. Clean yourself up till we have a meal in reasonable peace and quiet.’

(This use of till, meaning ‘so that’ or ‘in order that’, is another feature of Irish English.)

The cut of X often indicates old or scruffy appearance, but it can involve looking smart if that’s somehow inappropriate or perceived as comical. Margaret Dunlop, Water for Tea:

I looked in disgust at my good suit hanging on the wardrobe door. I hated every inch of it from the box pleated skirt to the double-breasted jacket with the big buttons. I was thankful none of the girls from town attended our chapel. They’d get the quare laugh at the cut of me in it. Mammy said the blue pure wool cloth was very dear and Miss Pedan was the best dressmaker in the country.

Syntactically the phrase often follows some form of look, see, or know. Sometimes it’s framed in a rhetorical conditional (‘Would you look at the cut of me’) or abridged to its bare exclamatory form (‘The cut of him!’). Cut can also suggest nature as well as appearance. John Boyne, A History of Loneliness:

I was used to lads his age, I’d worked with them for years. They didn’t scare or intimidate me. I knew the cut of them, I knew the smell of them. There was nothing they could say that could shock or embarrass me, no matter how hard they tried.

And it can entail someone’s funny or absurd situation, as in Jan Carson’s short story ‘We’ve Got Each Other and That’s a Lot’:

We spend a lot of time waiting in the car with the heaters off. It is colder behind the glass than outside. I can see my breath curling over my parents’ heads in whispers. My Mammy used to laugh at this and say, ‘look at the cut of us, like fire-breathing dragons.’

It can be neutral in tone, with no pejorative intent. Paul Lynch, Red Sky in Morning:

And then Gillen saw Coyle coming towards him, the man with his hands in his pockets and his hat and head down low but he knew the cut of him, watched him push through the crowd, the man not lifting his head and making towards the gangway …

The tone can even be admiring, or the criticism more oblique, as in Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December:

They were touring Europe, thank you very much (the cut of them, Mother said, that fella hadn’t a seat in his pants growing up and he’s going around now touring Europe for himself! …)

But it’s more usually negative. And, I should mention, it doesn’t always refer to people. John B. Keane, Love Bites and Other Stories:

Haven’t you seen the cut of stray tomcats returning from forays into strange, moonlit territories? Scratched and bleeding they have paid the price for seductive meeowing in the principalities of other cats.

The phrase doesn’t seem to be too widely documented, but it shows up in some slang and specialist dictionaries. The 2004 New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Dalzell and Victor eds.) defines this cut as ‘someone’s appearance’, labels it Irish, and notes its usually derogatory use.

Bernard Share’s Slanguage: A Dictionary of Irish Slang and Colloquial English in Ireland concurs and says it comes from the expression ‘cut a (fine, poor, etc.) figure, c.1760–’. Maybe. Or it could have come from the cut of one’s jib, which the OED lists as sense III.17(c) of cut (n.) and defines as ‘one’s general appearance or look’.

The cut of one’s jib has nautical origins – a jib is a type of sail – and is a couple of centuries old. It’s an offshoot of OED sense III.17(a) ‘the shape to which, or style in which a thing is cut; fashion, shape (of clothes, hair, etc.)’ – as in hair-cut. This matches sense 19 (of 21) in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary: ‘The shape or fashion to which a thing is cut; figure, bearing; mark’.

And that’s the cut of the cut of X.

You can browse the archive for more Irish English dialect features.

He was back among the city’s voices, and it was the rhythm of them that slowed the rush of his thoughts. —Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

Kevin Barry’s award-winning first novel City of Bohane (Jonathan Cape, 2011) is an extravagant experiment in language, rich in Irish English slang and vernacular. It may take non-Irish readers a little while to tune in to its sounds and rhythms, but the rewards are considerable.

This post annotates a few items of linguistic interest in the book.

Divil a bit stirred in the Trace that he didn’t know about, nor across the Smoketown footbridge.

Divil (rhymes with civil) is a common pronunciation of devil in colloquial Irish English. The idiom divil a bit has various emphatic negative meanings: ‘not at all’, ‘none at all’, and in Barry’s line, ‘nothing at all’.

Divil is such a frequent feature of traditional Irish English that P.W. Joyce, in English As We Speak It In Ireland, dedicated an entire chapter to ‘the devil and his territory’.

Bleached light on the plain of Nothin’ and a fado lament wailed distant from somewhere on the pikey rez.

Fadó /fɑ’d̪oː/ is an Irish word meaning ‘long ago’. It often appears at the start of a seanchaí’s story, where it’s sometimes repeated: Fadó fadó ‘Long, long ago’. In Barry’s example ‘a fado lament’ is a lament from bygone days.

The lads jogged in a staggered line around the irregular perimeter of the field and in sequence one of them would break off from the stagger, take a sprint for the field’s gate and have a lep at it.

Lep is a colloquial Irish English way of saying leap. It can cause momentary confusion when horses in show jumping, for instance, are referred to as leppers.

‘there’d be as much herb as you can lung an’ ale to folly.’

‘Looks like we’s gettin’ a folly awrigh’,’ …

Follow becoming folly is another pronunciation characteristic of some speakers of informal Irish English. Barry shows it in verb and noun forms.

The pills that landed on her tongue – and she had a tongue like sandpaper today, whatever was after going skaw-ways in that department – she washed down with a swallow of John Jameson taken direct from the neck of the bottle.

‘Sufferin’ Baba above on the cross,’ he said. ‘The heart would be skaw-ways in you, Balt?’

The fine phrase skaw-ways is anglicised in various ways: skaw-ways, skew-ways, scew-ways, skeow-ways, skow-ways. It means ‘side-ways’, ‘slanted’, or ‘crooked’, and comes from Irish sceabha ‘slant’, though the tie to English skew is also manifest. (Baba here means Baby Jesus, by the way.)

Skaw-ways is used figuratively both times in Bohane, and the first example also shows the grammatical feature known as the after perfect or hot news perfect in Irish English: ‘whatever was after going skaw-ways’ means ‘whatever had (just) gone skaw-ways’.

‘Was it Dick had the daughter married the fella of the Delaceys?’

In standard English this line would be: ‘Was it Dick who had the daughter who married…’ Omitting the relative pronoun results in a contact clause, in this case a subject contact clause, and not just one but two in recursive succession. See my earlier post for more on this nonstandard grammatical syntax.

‘I’m sorry for yere troubles,’ he said.

Yere is your (plural) in vernacular Irish English, where ye (plural ‘you’) is in widespread use alongside youse, yiz, and other forms.

‘McGroartys are born latchiko.’

Latchiko (also latchico) is a pejorative noun applied to someone unpleasant or lazy. Many possible etymologies have been proposed, including from Irish and Old French, but the word’s origin remains uncertain.

‘The Gypo’ Lenihan thought he had seen quareness in his time but nowt so quare as the pairing at the bar.

Quare is an interesting case. It derives from queer and sometimes (as above) simply means ‘strange’. But ‘the two phonetic forms … have diverged semantically’, Séamas Moylan writes in Southern Irish English, and quare is used in multiple other ways, many of them idiomatic and positive.

Quare can mean ‘good’ or ‘remarkable’. Quare and can mean ‘very’ (‘You’re quare and good on the guitar!’ – Pat McCabe, Emerald Germs of Ireland). The quare place means hell; the quare stuff is poitín. I’ll return to the Irish English pronunciation of ‘-ee-’ and ‘-ea-’ in a future post.

For a fuller flavour of The City of Bohane, you can see Kevin Barry reading from the book in the video below, while The Millions has a good interview with him about Bohane and writing in general.

In ‘The Last Campaign’, from her story collection Orange Horses (Tramp Press, 2016), Maeve Kelly portrays a marriage whose members have deeply contrasting – and sometimes clashing – communication styles. Martha and Joe are a middle-aged couple devoted to each other and to their farm, on which much of their conversation turns:

Herself and Joe met at the tap on the wall outside. He hosed down his boots, thinking about something.

‘Isn’t it a beautiful day, Joe,’ she said. ‘You might get the last of the hay drawn in today.’

‘I might,’ he said, looking up at a small, dark cloud away on the horizon and checking the direction of the wind. ‘If it holds. I think there’s a change.’

‘It’ll hardly break before this evening,’ she said.

‘Maybe not.’

She wondered to herself why his sentences were always so short. Words spilled over in her own mind so much. She had to hold them back, conscious always of his brief replies and afraid she might become garrulous in her effort to fill the void. ‘Communication,’ she reminded herself sometimes, ‘is not only made with speech.’

From this brief exchange we understand not only each character’s expressive preferences but also the effect of the difference on Martha, who would likely be more talkative were Joe not so taciturn. For this lack she must console herself with truisms. And yet their mutual fondness is unmistakable and is underscored implicitly as the tale unfolds.

Joe’s ‘I might’, incidentally, shows a linguistic tendency characteristic of Irish people. The Irish language has no words for yes and no, instead generally affirming or negating by repeating the verb used by the other speaker; this grammatical pattern is often carried over into Irish English: ‘Will you have another cup?’ ‘I will.’

The use of herself (‘Herself and Joe met…’) at the start of the passage is another feature of the dialect, one I’ll explore properly another time.

Later, Martha is working inside when Joe returns, and we learn more about their mismatched tendencies and how the couple accommodated these in their marriage:

‘Any post?’ she asked him when he came back half an hour later.

‘Not a thing,’ he said.

‘Any news at the creamery?’

‘Not a word.’

It was almost a ritual. She clutched at the few sentences he let fall without prompting, and would sometimes go over them afterwards, savouring each preposition, each monosyllabic word. Once when she had the temerity to reproach him for not talking to her more often, he said she’d have something to grumble about if he was out every night in the local with the boys, or running after some flighty woman who wanted to be run after. She had to agree that it surely would be something to grumble about, but it wasn’t a fair comparison. He was a just man, so he said, ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind,’ and went away before she could retaliate. She wanted to scream after him, ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind, too, but I need to share it. If I don’t share it with you it might be with one of your friends who holds my hand too long when saying goodbye, or squeezes me when we’re dancing at the hunt ball.’ It wouldn’t do any good, of course. And she didn’t want to start screaming. She calculated that one scream led to another, and she might end up screaming at herself.

In another story this tension might be the fulcrum, but for Maeve Kelly here it’s background texture. The real drama lies in circumstance, in sudden events on the farm, which I won’t reveal. But these too reflect the couple’s divergent natures. In the aftermath, with ‘silence in every corner’, Martha talks to herself:

Her monologues were successful therapy. In the past, she had talked herself out of gloom, neurosis, over-confidence, inhibition. She could intone her predicament to the sink, word for word, until it hung there quivering under her accusing eye, and finally disintegrated with the bubbles in the dish water. Joe’s healing process was slower and perhaps more painful because he was not able to articulate his despair. Their fathers would have said, ‘God’s holy will be done,’ and slipped the problem easily on to divine shoulders. Such faith and such relief were not a part of their lives.

Another story in Orange Horses, ‘The Fortress’, depicts a similar difference except that this time the woman is the quiet one and her husband is the chatterbox:*

Her words were sparse, each one expressing its precise meaning, whereas he used words with lush extravagance, rolling them off his tongue, relishing the embroidery they added to his thought. She envied him his verbosity sometimes, because she felt traitorously that if she had such words within her control she would make better use of them.

Orange Horses, published by Tramp Press as part of its Recovered Voices series, is one of the strongest story collections I’ve ever read. Tramp’s Lisa Coen describes its multitude of voices as ‘a complex and brilliant weaving of a secret history of Irish women from an author capable of profound empathy and scathing imagination’.

The striking cover design is by Fiachra McCarthy.

*

* The stereotype of women talking much more than men gave the name to an excellent mythbusting linguistics book I reviewed in 2016.

In standard English the primary meaning of the adjective bold is ‘brave, courageous, unafraid, daring’. This can shade into a related, negative sense of impudence, brazenness, or presumption. Another common sense is ‘visibly prominent, distinct, strong, or clear’, often associated with lines or colour. For nuance, compare the definitions by M-W, AHD, Oxford, Macmillan, Cambridge, and Collins.

When I first learned the word, though, it was in none of these senses: it meant ‘naughty, mischievous’. If I heard someone (including myself) described as bold, it meant they were misbehaving – or maybe being playful in a cheeky way. This is a very common usage in Irish English but absent from standard English; there’s no mention of it in the OED.

The sense is so intrinsic to the word in Ireland that when I read this line in Swing Time by Zadie Smith last week, I had to read it twice to be sure of the intent:

I’d been bold and walked into the church at the end of one of her rehearsals.

Smith means the word in the main standard sense. But I was primed to read the word Irishly because the narrator is a child, and bold in Irish English usually refers to misbehaving children (or puppies); the girl may even have been going to confession. Bernard Share, in Slanguage, quotes Lar Redmond in Emerald Square:

My poor mother had to spread her ration of love out too thinly and sometimes when I was bold – and that was often – there was none left over for me at all.

Bold may also be used by adults referring to themselves if they want to downplay the seriousness of their actions:

Or if they feel they’re being treated like children:

Also in the Irish Examiner, a few years ago, Ciara Flaherty described being bold as ‘a uniquely Irish way of misbehaving – otherwise known as “acting the maggot”, “kaffling” or “being a scut”.’ She shares this clip of Irish children talking about being bold:

The origins of the usage are not certain, but a couple of sources (Share’s Slanguage and Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English) suggest the influence of Irish dána, which straddles the senses: it can mean ‘daring, brazen,’ or ‘naughty‘ in reference to children.

[more posts on Irish English]

In A Brilliant Void, a new anthology of vintage Irish science fiction edited by Jack Fennell (Tramp Press, 2018), I saw some examples of a grammatical feature I’ve been meaning to write about: the Irish English suffix –een. Anglicised from Irish –ín /iːn/, it normally signifies littleness or endearment but can also disparage or serve other functions.

Look up –ín in Ó Dónaill’s Irish-English dictionary and you’ll find such diverse examples as an t-éinín bíogach ‘the chirpy little bird’, an choisín chomair ‘the neat little foot’, an bheainín ghleoite ‘the charming little woman’, an méirín púca ‘the foxglove’, and an paidrín páirteach ‘the family rosary’.

The –ín suffix is so productive in Irish, and Irish so influences the traditional dialects of English in Ireland, that it’s no surprise –een became established in vernacular Irish English, especially in the west. You probably know it if you’re at all familiar with Irish speech or culture; even if not, you may recognise some of the examples below.

The stories in A Brilliant Void range from 1837 to 1960. In these earlier incarnations sci-fi sometimes drew on gothic or occult traditions, as well as – appropriately for this post – folk-belief. In ‘The Sorcerer’ by County Mayo writer Charlotte McManus (1853–1944), a woman is party to a ritual involving blades of grass placed in a bowl of water:

‘Take out the blade that comes nearest to you,’ he said.

She drew out the short blade.

‘As long as you keep that bitteen of grass, you will look young to any man wanting a wife.’

A few pages later, the word is used again:

‘I seen him take a bitteen of grass,’ said the wife-seeker, ‘and put it in a bowl of water and say the prayer of the saint of the muscles over it. That would be one charm. Many do be coming to him for it.’

(‘Many do be coming’ is explained in my post on the habitual aspect in Irish English.) A bitteen later there is a more familiar example:

The Experimenter went out the next morning. About eleven, he reached the boreen that led to the slated house. He followed the boreen and saw a man going before him driving a donkey with creels of turf.

Boreen ‘country lane’, listed in some English dictionaries, is from Irish bóithrín ‘little road’, from bóthar ‘road’ + –ín. Walking along a boreen, you may encounter a boneen or bonneen ‘piglet’, from Irish bainbhín (banbh ‘pig’ + –ín). Animal names often contain the suffix, especially small or baby animals. This glossary of Irish bird names has many.

It’s rife in the natural world. Dolan’s Hiberno-English Dictionary contains entries for cúilín ‘little field’, kippeen ‘little stick’ (from Irish cipín, used when lighting a fire), móinín ‘grassy patch’, pairceen (Irish páircín) ‘small field’, puithín ‘puff of wind’, rúitín ‘ankle, knuckle, fetlock’ (< Irish rúta ‘root’), táithín ‘wisp, tuft, tiny fistful’, among others. All these Irish words have been borrowed into Irish English.

Boreen (bóithrín ‘small road’) in County Galway, with mandatory grass growing down the middle and a shedeen in the middle distance

While –een can be used to form nonce words (examples further down), it sometimes becomes lexicalised and cannot be removed without undoing the sense, e.g., smithereens (Irish smidrín ‘small fragment’); poteen (poitín ‘little pot’); spalpeen (spailpín), an itinerant labourer, a rascal, or a boy; jackeen, a certain type of Dubliner; and shebeen / sheebeen ‘unlicensed drinking place’ or ‘whiskey’, from Irish síbín, possibly from séibe ‘mug’ + –ín.

Irish folklore has a phenomenon called the fóidín meara, also fóidín mearaí, marbh, mearbhall, mearaide, etc., where someone out walking steps on a piece of ground and immediately loses all sense of direction. It literally means ‘little sod of bewilderment’; fóidín is diminutive of fód ‘sod’. Decades ago, children were commonly asked to bring a fód (sod of turf) to school to contribute to its heating.

Irish cuisine makes ample use of the suffix. The famous seaweed carrageen (carragheen, carrigeen, etc.) owes its name to carraig + –ín, literally ‘little rock’. You might put a dropeen of its jelly in your bowleen of soup. A toirtín is a small scone or cake (good with a suppeen of tae), a póirín a small potato. Drisheens and crubeens feature drisín ‘intestine’, i.e., a type of black pudding, and crúibín ‘little hoof or claw’, i.e., pig’s trotter.

The suffix is widely used to form hypocoristic or pet names. Maureen is from Irish Máirín, from Máire ‘Mary’ + –ín. Similarly there is Noreen from Nora, Páidín (‘Paudeen’) from Páid ‘Pat’, and Colleen, an anglicisation of cailín ‘girl’, diminutive of caile. Flann O’Brien’s pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (also Gopaleen) derives from Irish capaillín ‘pony, little horse’.

People are often described metaphorically as animals. Cearc ‘hen’ gives us circín ‘small hen’, which is used figuratively to refer, as Dolan writes, to ‘a prim little girl who is too precocious for her age’. A líbín ‘minnow, small fish’ (from líob ‘wet rag’) can denote a person or thing that’s dripping wet. Bottheen, anglicised from baitín (dim. of bata ‘stick’), can mean a baton or, figuratively, a ruffian who might wield a small stick.

Even more prevalent is –een in direct address. Girleen is popular, and appears in these lines from contemporary Irish literature:

Hello girleen I thought it was you. (Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing)

‘Now, Girleen,’ she says. ‘I think it’s past time you had a bath.’ (Claire Keegan, Foster)

Here the suffix indicates endearment, not size, though age can be a factor too. Boyeen is also heard, as are ladeen and maneen:

The self-deprecatory use of maneen will be familiar to Joyce enthusiasts:

‘I was standing at the end of the South Terrance one day with some maneens like myself and sure we thought we were grand fellows because we had pipes in our mouths.’ (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

Maybe those pipes were dudeens (dhoodeens, dúidíns) ‘short-stemmed clay pipes’. As you might guess, –een is frequent when addressing loved ones, whether it’s in names, pet names, girleen/ladeen and co., or in terms of endearment such as loveen, mavourneen (Irish mo mhuirnín ‘my darling’), and a stórín (‘treasure’ in vocative case).

Irish and Irish English have other diminutive suffixes, and they’re occasionally interchangeable: –óg, found in seamróg, etymon of ‘shamrock’, is from seamair ‘clover’ + –óg ‘young’. A tiachóg is a small bag or wallet. A lúidín ‘little finger’ is also called a lúideog; a scráidín ‘scrap of food; worthless little person or thing’ can be a scráideog.

But –ín / –een predominates, and it has phonology in its favour. Otto Jespersen, in a chapter on sound symbolism in Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, writes:

The vowel [i], especially in its narrow or thin variety, is particularly appropriate to express what is small, weak, insignificant, or, on the other hand, refined or dainty. It is found in a great many adjectives in various languages.

A birdeen – a wee robineen – in Salthill in Galway one cold November

Note that –ín has other functions as a suffix, and the semantic connection can be oblique. From smacht ‘discipline, order, control, rule’ we get smachtín ‘cudgel, club’. Paidir ‘prayer’ gives us paidrín ‘rosary’. From nóin ‘noon’ (or ‘nones’ in the ecclesiastical sense) we have nóinín ‘daisy’.

Séamas Moylan’s excellent book Southern Irish English (SIE) (Geography Publications, 2009) has an extended passage on the suffix, which he describes as ‘diminutive-affectionate and diminutive-pejorative in Ir. and SIE alike’. In its positive sense, he writes,

it is generally used (often hypocoristically) of something small and implies endearment, e.g. Pegeen “little Peg”, Tomeen “little Tom”, boyeen, girleen, robineen, houseen /ho̤ʊʃiːn/ (with /ʃ/ for /s/ in the vicinity of a palatal vowel).

The /ʃ/ for /s/ pattern is something I had long followed unconsciously until Moylan spelled it out. It’s always mouse → ‘mousheen’, face → ‘faceen’ with a ‘sh’: /feːʃiːn/.

In the suffix’s negative sense, Moylan goes on,

–een becomes “a morphological device for the expression of disparagement” (Weinreich 1963). Burke (1896) suggests that “the delicate flavour of contempt conveyed by this suffix cannot be adequately represented in English” . . . . Jackeen “native of Dublin” implies the special combination of conceit and urban slickness peculiar to (or attributed to) “little” citizens of the capital. From a rural-historical context comes squireen, which Joyce (1910) defines as “an Irish gentleman in a small way who apes the manners . . . of the large landed proprietors. Sometimes,” he adds, “you can hardly distinguish a squireen from a shoneen”, i.e. “a would-be gentleman who puts on superior airs (Ibid.). However, shoneen (Ir. Seoinín, from E John + –ín) has the more general and inclusive implication of obsequiousness, toadying and lack of principle; in a political and cultural context it can mean a “West Briton”, i.e. one who looks to Britain for norms and values.

(A search for West Brit on Twitter shows its continuing popularity as an insult.) The pejorative connotations of –een are explicit in the political epithet sleeveen, which I wrote about a few years back. Priesteen ‘little priest’ can go either way, being used both affectionately and pejoratively, more often the latter, I think.

Moylan also describes the curious development that ‘in some dialects or idiolects of Ir. –ín seems to have run riot’:

The suffix is still popular in the west and seems to be especially favoured by rural-based monoglot E speakers, e.g. “…a pumpeen … a small wireen … a three-cord flexeen /flekʃiːn/ … make the chase [in the wall] a small biteen deeper …” (a Galway electrician’s instructions to his apprentice). The repeated use of the redundant small suggests that the –een termination has ceased to carry the sense of diminutiveness and that it is used so freely as to have become a verbal reflex without semantic charge. This conclusion is reinforced by the following from the same speaker: “[He was] wearin’ an oul capeen with a speckeen [Ir. speic ‘peak’ + –ín] an’ it fallin’ down over his faceen /feːʃiːn/.” Further –een forms from him are badgereen, birdeen, bullockeen, dogeen, fieldeen, fisheen, footeen, handeen, sandpiteen, shoe-een, whore-een. Collectively, the exx above bring to mind Mary McCarthy’s observation that diminutization of something “has the curious effect of at once deprecating and dignifying it”.

Though I use the –een suffix regularly, only a couple of the above terms sound natural to me, and I would say them only in particular contexts. Such superfluity can also be seen in the folk tale ‘The Little Cakeen’: ‘Once upon a time there was a little maneen and a little womaneen; and the little womaneen made a little cakeen and put it in the oven to bake.’

The seemingly redundant use occurs in my own speech: If I’m offered an extra helping of vegetables or cake, I might reply, ‘I’ll have a small bitteen.’ Or I could refer to a baby’s ‘(tiny) little feeteen’. Here the suffix intensifies or underlines the littleness – a small bitteen is less than a small bit or a bitteen.

Speaking of which, I’ve gone on a bitteen longer than I meant to, so I’ll wrap it up. Let me know if you use or abuse this suffix, or if you’ve come across any interesting example-eens. You can also read about other people’s use of it in the replies to this tweet:

(See the archive for more Irish English.)

In Irish English, the word grand has the familiar meanings: impressive, magnificent, high-ranking, very large, etc. – size being etymologically salient – but its most common use is in the dialectal sense ‘OK, fine, satisfactory’. As such it often appears in brief, affirmative replies:

How’s it going?
Grand, thanks.

Was the sea cold?
It was grand.

How did the interview go?
I got on grand.

I’ll pick you up in an hour.
Grand.

I’m sorry about that.
Ah no, you’re grand. [Don’t worry about it.]

This use of grand is so routine and prevalent in Ireland that it’s virtually a state of mind (and hence popular in T-shirt designs and the like). This comes in handy for understatement in injurious situations:

News site TheJournal.ie makes frequent use of grand in its story tags, such as ‘grand job’ (OK, fine), ‘grand so’ (OK, fine), ‘sure it’s grand’ (it’s fine, it’ll do), and ‘be grand’ (It’ll be grand, i.e., It’ll do fine). It also puts it in headlines:

Grand has more strongly positive connotations in some contexts, such as the popular phrase grand stretch, referring to the longer evenings in spring and summer. Here’s an Irish Examiner piece:

The closeness of these senses is apparent in the OED, which categorizes them together (A11a) as a colloquial usage ‘historically commoner in North American, Scottish, Irish English, and English regional usage than in standard British English’. It defines it thus:

Used as a general term to express strong admiration, approval, or gratification: magnificent, splendid; excellent; highly enjoyable. Also: (in weakened use, chiefly Irish English) satisfactory, fine, all right. Also in ironic use.

The OED separates off sense A11b, limiting it to people’s state of being: ‘well, in good health. Frequently in negative contexts.’

Use of grand can stray into ambiguity. If you offer someone dessert and they say ‘Grand’, it means they accept – though without particular enthusiasm. If they say ‘You’re grand’ or ‘I’m grand’, they don’t. (Often, though, declining a first offer is just politeness; offer again, with more encouragement, and they may well accept. ‘Ah, go on, so.’)

Ambiguity between the main standard sense (‘impressive, magnificent’) and the main Irish sense (‘OK, acceptable’) can also arise, as it did momentarily for me when I read these lines in The Enemy by Lee Child:

We found the O Club without any trouble. It occupied half of one of the ground-floor wings of the main building. It was a grand space, with high ceilings and intricate plaster mouldings.

Irish English dictionaries’ treatments of grand are worth noting. Here are three reputable sources:

Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable, by Sean McMahon and Jo O’Donoghue, sums up the Irish usage as indicating ‘modest satisfaction’, adding that it’s also used (as in standard dialects) ‘as a synonym of “posh”, with an implication of snobbery: “She’s very grand.”’

The late Terry Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English says the adjective is ‘used very widely in HE to indicate a general sense of wellbeing’, and cites Shay Healy (Irish Daily Mail, 23 December 2009) describing it as ‘a powerful word that can confirm the truth or varnish a lie in a way that keeps the social wheels permanently oiled’.

Bernard Share, in Slanguage, defines grand as ‘fine, first-class, all right’ and quotes two instructive examples: ‘Generally, in their marriage, they got on. “Fine, not great, but grand”, she repeatedly summed up the four years of their relationship’ (Nell McCafferty, Sunday Tribune, 1996); ‘Happiness is not a condition that a normal Irish person ever recognises. Being “grand” is the most we aspire to’ (Frank McNally, Irish Times, 2007).

If you’re Irish, or an Irish English speaker, this use of grand is probably an intrinsic feature of your dialect. If you’re not, and you hear it used but are uncertain how it’s intended, my advice is to not worry. It’ll be grand.

[more posts on Irish English]

Culchie is a word used in Irish English to mean someone from the Irish countryside (or a small town or village), especially from the point of view of a Dubliner. Though originally pejorative, culchie has been partly reclaimed and is now often used neutrally, warmly, or as a tribal badge by those who live or come from beyond the Pale (i.e., Dublin and its urban environs).

While the word’s meaning is clear enough, its origin is uncertain and much speculated upon, as we’ll see. First, I’ll look at its use in Irish culture and literature. Its phonetic similarity to culture, incidentally, informed the aptly named (and now defunct) pop culture website Culch.ie, where I used to write about cult films – the URL trades nicely on Ireland’s internet top-level domain .ie.

The equivalent of a culchie elsewhere might be a bumpkin, a peasant, or a yokel. In Ireland the synonyms are likewise derogatory: bogger (bogman, bogwoman), mucker, the gloriously suggestive muck savage. So too is the antonym jackeen, referring to a certain type of Dubliner.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable notes that while culchie was initially an insult indicating rusticity, it now tends to be used in jest or affection, a change owing to Ireland’s modernisation, specifically ‘the rise in the standard of living and in educational standards in Ireland from the 1960s onwards’.

Mayo countryside: briars, stone walls, mossy verges, sheep, cattle, and muck are fond and familiar sights to any culchie worth their salt

The culchie stereotype still shows up in culchie jokes that exploit the rural/urban divide. It appeared more favourably in the celebrated Culchie Festival, whose (mainly farming-inspired) events included welly throwing, wool rolling, and a charity Honda 50 run. You can get a flavour – or a whiff – in archive clips from state broadcaster RTÉ.

Many Irish people grow up in rural parts and settle, at least for a time, in the city. And so, as Rob McNamara writes, ‘Some of us are a curious blend of the two, never knowing quite which we belong to and face mockery on both sides.’ Slagging (like BrE slagging off, but more playful) is a social lubricant in Ireland, and the culchie/townie divide offers a readymade basis for it.

You can test your culchie status with these quizzes from Valerie Loftus, a writer from Mayo: the significance of that place will soon become apparent. Ultimately, writes Mary Feely, ‘It’s not carried in the blood – a Dub can have culchie parents and vice-versa – but it is fixed at birth.’ As the saying goes, you can take a person out of the bog …

Search for culchie on the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, TheJournal.ie, Twitter, or YouTube and you’ll get a further sense of its salience as a cultural marker in Ireland. Yet for all its reappropriation, culchie can still serve as a putdown. Tara Flynn’s book You’re Grand: The Irishwoman’s Secret Guide to Life zeroes in on the connotations:

A “culchie” is someone from the countryside, or small town. Or just plain outside Dublin. In fact, Dubliners are really the only people in the land who will never be called culchies at some point. …

We’re supposed to be un-chic, good with animals, able to predict the weather, have few electrical outlets and be very friendly, but a biteen thick. City dwellers tend to see themselves as having attributes exactly the opposite of these. In other words, they think they’re great.

There was an attempt to give Dubs the nickname “Jackeen” but it doesn’t seem to sting as much as “culchie” does. In fact, they like it because it makes them feel even more Dubliny. We’ve even tried to take back “culchie” for ourselves, but the lingering bovine associations just can’t quite be shaken off.

Culchie is put to good use in Irish literature. Characters in Normal People by Sally Rooney (another author native to Mayo) move to Dublin from Sligo in the west of Ireland, and the social and sociolinguistic differences between those worlds sometimes arise in conversation:

Is that your type, you like uncool guys? he said.
You tell me.
Why, am I uncool?
I think so, she said. I mean that in a nice way, I don’t like cool people.
He sat up slightly to look down at her.
Am I really? he said. I’m not offended but honestly, I thought I was kind of cool.
You’re such a culchie, though.
Am I? In what way am I?
You have the thickest Sligo accent, she said.

(See my post on southern Irish accents for related discussion.) Elsewhere in Normal People, the young man with the thick Sligo accent is described as a ‘milk-drinking culchie’ who drinks it ‘directly from the carton’. Eoin Colfer’s Benny and Babe conveys the same perceived lack of sophistication by using culchie as a modifier:

They still kept in touch Sort of. A letter once in a while. Maybe an accidental meeting on the main street if she was in town buying jeans, or whatever else you couldn’t get in those culchie shops in the back of beyonds.

As does Maeve Binchy, in Light a Penny Candle: ‘Oh, nothing as bad as a culchie wedding I always say.’

People from towns and counties adjacent to Dublin, such as Kildare, may or may not be culchies, depending on who’s deciding. In Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s novel You, the eponymous ten-year-old narrator says:

Noel doesn’t like The Irish Times. He says it’s a Proddy newspaper and then he says ‘Up the Republic!’ and Cora says ‘Will you stop that codology.’ Cora says things like that because she’s a culchie. But she hates being called that. ‘I’m from inside the Pale,’ she says, as if that matters. You say that Kildare is not the centre of the universe and she says it is for some people.

Proddy is short for Protestant, and codology is codding, i.e., fooling, messing around, another Irish English dialect word, which appends the technical suffix –ology ironically to the vernacular verb cod ‘to joke, hoax, or fool’.¹

Ní Chonchúr’s book hints at how culchie could be used as a tease among children. Adults might do the same thing, and call it slagging, but with no real offence intended or taken. At least, not usually.

Etymologically, the most popular idea is that culchie comes from Kiltimagh, the name of a small town in County Mayo (seen as provincial or remote), from Irish Coillte Mach ‘woods of the plain’. English and Irish pronunciations can be heard at Logainm.² Kiltimagh is the etymon suggested by the OED, Oxford, and Collins.

Culchie could come simply from coillte ‘woods’ or coillteach ‘wooded’. It may be a clipping of agricultural, arising as university slang for students of agriculture. T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English briefly notes this possibility. Other sources suggest the Irish phrase cúl an tí /ˈkuːlɑ(n)ˈtʃiː/ ‘back of the house’, the idea being that that’s how country folk visit neighbours. But this has the ring of folk etymology for me.

Another possibility is advanced in a 1997 letter to the Irish Times:

In the 1930s and 1940s, we told Dubliners that we were from the Cúl Siar Amach [/ˈkuːlˌʃɪərəˈmɑx/ ‘back out west’, i.e., back of beyond] to baffle them when they asked where we were from. We became the feared Culchies, invading Dublin to take all the good Civil Service jobs. Where in heaven did this nonsense about Kiltimagh come from?

But the Kiltimagh connection is strengthened in Brendan Behan’s Confessions of an Irish Rebel, quoted in Slanguage, Bernard Share’s dictionary of Irish slang and colloquialisms: Behan refers to ‘the Culchiemachs, as we called the Irish-speaking people’. One final idea that I came across draws a connection with culch, a bed of shells and stones used in oyster farming.

Other etymologies have been proposed, but those are the main ones. The earliest use of the word that I’ve seen, cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, is from ‘The Munster-Man’s Bothabue’ in Luke Caffrey’s Gost, c.1790:

But I’ll away to Culchy fair my Bothabue to find,
I’ll range the flow’ry meadows gay in hopes that they prove kind.

After that there’s nothing for over a century in the usual sources. So it’s an open question, unless someone digs up a persuasive origin story. Don’t forget your wellies.

If you go digging, be ready for a mess. Field entrance in County Mayo.

¹ Joyce uses all these words in Ulysses, e.g.: ‘you can cod him up to the two eyes’; ‘Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I’; ‘Bloom comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business’.

² That coill ‘wood’ was often anglicized as ‘kil(l)’ has caused no little confusion, because ‘kil(l)’ was also used for cill ‘church’. Plural coillte ‘woods’ was anglicized less problematically as ‘kilty’ or ‘quilty’: Kiltyclogher in County Leitrim comes from Coillte Cloghair ‘woods of the stony place’.

Brian Moore, last seen on this blog Irishly having tea, uses a couple of interesting dialect words in his 1958 novel The Feast of Lupercal. One of them, codding, is in my idiolect in various forms, including codology; the other, stravaging, I’ve seldom seen and had to look up.

An old sexton, dusting the church in the evening, is obliged to let in two people preparing for a play:

… some people had no consideration, stopping a man in the middle of his work. Every afternoon for the past week they had come stravaging up for their rehearsals, the pair of them. Once, they even came back at night.

Brooding on the interruption, the sexton is annoyed that the church hall is regularly opened for plays, lectures, card games, and ‘all kinds of codology’. Later he wonders, ‘Are they codding me, or what?’ Then two other characters have this exchange:

‘So help me God it was the first time I ever tried.’

‘That’s the best yet. Who do you think you’re codding, Devine?’

‘I’m not codding!’

If you didn’t know the words, you could probably infer their meaning from the context. Codding is joking or fooling. The verb, attested from the 19C, can be used transitively or intransitively: Are you codding me? is Are you joking me?, while I’m only codding is I’m only joking/messing. Beckett, in Waiting for Godot, has Pozzo say, ‘He wants to cod me’.

Cod is also a noun in the senses of fool or joke/nonsense. You can make a cod of someone, as in Seán O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman: ‘If you want to make a cod of anybody, make a cod of somebody else.’ Or you can say that something is a cod: ‘That thing about dying for the faith is all a cod’ —Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes.

The fool sense is older: the OED and Green’s Dictionary of Slang both note its first appearance in the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (c.1698). In the 18–19C it appears repeatedly in collections of British slang. It may come from English dialect, but its ultimate origin is unknown. Loreto Todd, in Green English, suggests a possible Irish etymon in cadach /ˈkɑd̯əx/, defined by Dineen as ‘humbug’.

Cod in the sense ‘joke, hoax, leg-pull’ is attested from the early 20th century, such as in Joyce’s Portrait: ‘Some fellows had drawn it there for a cod.’ It can also function as an adjective: Bernard Share’s Slanguage quotes a politician on Irish TV news saying: ‘that’s a cod argument: everyone knew what they were voting for’.

Irish English, with its fondness for mixing and messing, attaches the learned suffix –ology to this slang word to produce codology, defined as ‘hoaxing, humbugging’ in the OED, which has an amusing citation from the Daily Express, 1928:

There is in Ireland a science unknown to us in England called Codology… The English is ‘leg-pulling’… When I received an invitation to breakfast at the Dublin Zoo I thought that I could detect the hand of the chief codologist.

Though they’re etymologically unrelated, it’s worth comparing codology with codswallop, one of many florid English words for nonsense. Joyce, inevitably, includes it in Ulysses: ‘The why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business.’

I’d be interested in where people use or hear cod in these senses. It’s part of my active vocabulary, and I hear it regularly enough. As far as I know it’s part of the vernacular all over Ireland, but I’m open to correction. And is it used further afield?

Stravaging through the bluebells in Portumna Forest Park in Galway

The other word that struck me in Moore’s book is stravaging. When I saw it first I rhymed it with ravaging, but the bare form is actually /strəˈveɪɡ/ ‘struh-VAGUE’ (or in Irish English often /sθrɑˈveːɡ/ ‘sthra-VAGUE’), hence the spellings stravaig, stravague, and stravege. It means ‘to wander about aimlessly; to saunter, to stroll’ (T.P. Dolan, A Dictionary of Hiberno-English).

It can be used transitively: stravaging the road, the streets, the fields, the boreens, or the world. More often it’s intransitive, as in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: ‘They do be stravaging about always and not contented at all.’ The Dictionary of the Scots Language has lots of citations and related vocabulary.

The pronunciation confirms its derivation from Old French extravaguer, according to Jeremiah Hogan (The English Language in Ireland, 1927), quoted in Dolan. It may be an aphetic form of extravage, a rare verb in English meaning to digress or ramble, either physically or figuratively.

Stravage occurs in Scottish, northern, and Irish English, the OED says, but I don’t think I’ve heard it in the midwest of Ireland. Have you come across it in your own stravaging? No codding, now.

[more on Irish English]

I have an essay on Irish English dialect in the latest Stinging Fly (winter 2020–21). The issue, just out, centres on Galway – the city, the county, the state of mind – to tie in with its status as European Capital of Culture this year.

The Stinging Fly is an Irish literary magazine on the go since 1997 and a book publisher since 2005. You can order its publications from the website or, depending on where you are, from your local bookshop.

My essay looks at Galway dialect, though its features are not that different (or different mainly in degree) from southern Irish English in general. The grammar, vocabulary, idiom, and phonology of Irish English are all considered from my vantage point on the Atlantic coast.

I also discuss dialect more broadly, because people new to language studies are often unsure just what it means – linguistically, politically, performatively.

cover art by Maeve Curtis; design by Catherine Gaffney

An excerpt:

Language won’t develop in a social vacuum. It emerges in a group and comes to signal our identity as part of that group. In childhood we learn to talk like those around us – family, carers, peers – but in a unique way: an idiolect. Families may have a familect. Zoom out and we find a dialect – the variety of language spoken by a community, generally defined geographically or socially. Dialect includes grammar, vocabulary, accent, and usage.

Picture a line across Ireland from Sligo through Leitrim and Cavan over to Louth. Below it, for most people, scone rhymes with phone; above it, with gone. Near the line, usage is more mixed. The line is an isogloss, like a weather-map isobar but showing where a linguistic feature stops or changes. There’s one along the old Iron Curtain: in what was West Germany a pancake is a Pfannkuchen; east, it’s an Eierkuchen (‘egg cake’). A bundle of isoglosses together marks a rough dialect boundary, but it’s seldom tidy. Dialects bleed into one another, complicated by geography, politics, and human interaction.

I grew up in Mayo with a Galway address. It was an early lesson in natural borders: my local post office was over the bridge. As an island Ireland has never been especially isolated, though, and many trademark features of our dialect show up in Scotland, England, Australia, Canada, America, and elsewhere. Some came from Irish before being exported; some we borrowed from Scots or regional or archaic English. ‘Faith, and I’ll send him packing,’ Shakespeare wrote in Henry IV, Part 1, ‘Myself, he and my sister’ in The Comedy of Errors. Irish English is a complicated mosaic of influences, not all of them obvious.

Here’s the scone map, by the way.

‘“Wasn’t It Herself Told Me?” Irish English Dialect in Galway’ is the title. The phrase in quotes is from Galway author Eilís Dillon (1920–1994), whose centenary is this year. I also draw on works by, among others, Eavan Boland and Tim Robinson, both of whom we lost this year.

The essay is about 3,500 words long, eight and a bit pages among 240 offering short fiction, poetry, essays, and some arresting hybrids, the issue guest-edited by Lisa McInerney and Elaine Feeney. This short thread on Twitter includes a few quotes from other pieces:

Last month I mentioned my new essay on Irish English dialect, ‘Wasn’t It Herself Told Me?’, commissioned for the winter 2020 edition of the literary magazine The Stinging Fly.

If you didn’t get a copy of the Stinging Fly and want to read more of this material, you can now do so at the Irish Times website, which has published an abridged version of the essay. (I did the abridging myself, but some of the italics got lost in transit.)

Because the new Stinging Fly is a Galway special, the essay looks in particular at the Galway dialect, though this does not differ hugely from Irish English more broadly. The excerpt below elaborates on that point, using geography as an analogy:

Different regions of Ireland have distinctive landscapes, yet it makes sense sometimes to refer to ‘the Irish landscape’: it has unifying traits. Similarly there is merit to the idea of Irish English as a dialect. Any local dialect on the island will have properties that mark it as Irish English, though their frequency and proportion will vary from one place or speaker to the next.

So it is with Galway. Its dialects are close to those spoken anywhere west of the Shannon, where Irish lingered longer and had more effect on the English that largely, and violently, supplanted it. But the county’s size and topographical range mean there are considerable differences in local speech as we travel from the towns and farmlands of the east – virtually the midlands – through the city and westward to Connemara and the islands, where in many households Irish prevails.

Contact between languages is a driving force in language change. From the early 17th century ‘many Irish speakers began to communicate with English speakers by grafting English words and structures onto the stem of their Celtic language’, Loreto Todd writes in Green English. In this way there emerged ‘a form of English that reflected Irish influence at every linguistic level’ – sound, syntax, rhythm, idiom, vocabulary. Galway’s Gaeltacht and distance from Dublin and Ulster meant that influence was relatively strong here.

Irish is the source, for example, of the after-perfect, which uses after to form the perfect tense, usually in reporting something recent and of high informational value – hence its other name, the hot news perfect. Since Irish lacks a verb for have, a literal translation of the perfect tense (‘I have eaten’) was not possible, so we transposed Irish phrases like tar éıs and ı ndıaıdh to form ‘I’m after eating’.

You can read the rest here. The essay’s title is from a line in The Bitter Glass (1958) by Galway writer Eilís Dillon. 2020 is the centenary of her birth. The year has been a horror show, but it has its good points.

The Last of the Name by Charles McGlinchey (1861–1954) is an account of life in rural Ireland generations ago: customs, beliefs, practicalities, peculiarities. Published in 1986 with Brian Friel as editor, it is acclaimed as a ‘minor classic’ by Seamus Heaney. It’s also linguistically rich; in this and the next post I’ll note two words that caught my eye.

First up is gentle, in a supernatural sense not widely known or used. Here’s McGlinchey:

I always heard you should never strike a cow with a holly stick. Holly and hazel are two trees that are gentle [enchanted]. The people used to have a rhyme ‘Holly and hazel went to the wood, holly took hazel home by the lug.’ That meant that holly was the master of the hazel.

[Lug means ‘ear’. The parenthetical gloss for gentle is Friel’s.]

Holly and hazel recur in folk belief and have been credited with protective powers since ancient times. Niall Mac Coitir, in his book Irish Trees: Myths, Legends & Folklore, writes that in Ireland holly is a crann uasal, a ‘gentle’ or ‘noble’ tree, and that ‘you annoy the fairies when you misuse it, for example by sweeping the chimney with it’.

Later in McGlinchey’s book is an illuminating use of this dialectal gentle:

The present house in Binnion was built in 1816. When the building was going on, Michael had a ganger from Co. Derry quarrying stones. Whatever quarry the men were sent to, they thought it was gentle and refused to lift a sledge. So the ganger took off a red scarf he had round his neck, tied a knot on it and threw it on top of the rock. He told the men to be back next morning and that they’d see if it was gentle or not. Next morning the scarf was the same way as it was left the day before, so the men fell to the sledging, and there was no more word of the fairies.

Kevin Barry’s novel Night Boat to Tangier describes a similar conflict:

Gentle has several common senses in standardized English, and a bunch more that have lapsed from use since its arrival into English from Old French gentil ‘courteous, noble, high-born’ (hence gentleman), from Latin gentīlis ‘of the same clan’.

The gentle in The Last of the Name is defined in the OED as ‘enchanted or visited by fairies; associated with fairies’ and is labelled chiefly Irish English. The gentle folk and gentle people are among many euphemisms used in Ireland to refer to them. Here are some gentle citations from the OED and Bernard Share’s Slanguage:

The large hawthorns growing singly in fields, are deemed sacred to fairies, and are hence called gentle thorns. (Samuel McSkimin, The history and antiquities of the county of the town of Carrickfergus, 1823)

Woe betide the foolhardy person who ventures to raise an axe against one of these ‘gentle bushes’, as they are called. (The Cornhill Magazine, Feb. 1877)

‘Aw, Paddy,’ he said, ‘this part of Ireland is a gentle spot . . . The Wee Fellas be about.’ (Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool, 1938)

Mrs. Cartin’s father held Cloghnagalla to be a ‘gentle spot’, to be avoided, especially at Halloweve. (Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3(42), 1940)

Local views about our wood being somehow a fairy one: not in the sense of winged tinsel fairies, but as a ‘gentle place’ with some kind of special continuity with the past. (Folklore, 105(3/1), 1994)

And finally an enchanting passage from W. B. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight (1893):

A little north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand; no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to the deep considering. It is the door of faery-land. In the middle of night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. All night the gay rabble sweep to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unless perhaps where, in some more than commonly ‘gentle’ place – Drumcliff or Drum-a-hair – the nightcapped heads of faery-doctors may be thrust from their doors to see what mischief the ‘gentry’ are doing.

Dozens of Irish English words and phrases were added to the OED in March 2022, including Irish words used in Irish English. I’ve written about some of these before (hames, notions, plámás, ráiméis, ruaille buaille); others include a chara, blow-in, bockety, ceol, ciotóg, cúpla focal, delph, ghost estate, grá, guard, sean nós, segotia, and shift.

OED editor Danica Salazar writes:

The words and phrases featured in the OED’s March update provide a small yet vivid snapshot of Irish English usage in the past and present. We will continue our efforts in enriching the dictionary’s coverage of Irish English and feature even more new words and senses in future updates.

This will be welcomed by scholars who feel that Celtic words – and word-origins – in the English lexicon have traditionally been under-acknowledged by linguistic authorities. Loreto Todd, in Green English: Ireland’s Influence on the English Language, says there has been ‘a long-standing reluctance to recognise the presence of Celtic words in the English language’.*

Yet for all the richness and strength of Irish English dialects in Ireland and of Irish literature internationally, the influence of Irish and Irish English on the broader English language has been modest. You might wonder why, given Ireland and Great Britain’s geographical, social, and political (though fraught, i.e., colonialist) closeness.

In a chapter on loan words in Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin – the book is a century old this year – Otto Jespersen writes:

We now understand why so few Keltic words were taken over into French and English. There was nothing to induce the ruling classes to learn the language of the inferior natives: it could never be fashionable for them to show an acquaintance with a despised tongue by using now and then a Keltic word.

But this claim oversimplifies things, and the claim to understanding seems premature. In his modern account The Stories of English, David Crystal reviews historical, cultural, linguistic, genetic, and onomastic factors before concluding: ‘Why such intimate contact with Celtic tradition did not result in a greater influx of Celtic loanwords into Old English remains one of the great puzzles in the history of the language.’

Crystal wonders why the Anglo-Saxons were not influenced ‘by the majority Celtic languages around them’. Aside from place names, he writes, the influence is small; many words said to have Celtic origin might not, and even if they do, they remain few. In 2011 Oxford Dictionaries Online said it listed a mere 160–170 words of Irish origin. I don’t know if the figure has changed much since ODO merged with Dictionary.com.

While Crystal’s discussion includes the hypothesis advanced by Jespersen, it also offers its opposite:

There are various explanations, but all are speculation. Perhaps there was so little in common between the Celtic way of life as it had developed in Roman Britain, and the Anglo-Saxon way of life as it had developed on the Continent, that there was no motivation to borrow Celtic words. There might even have been a conscious avoidance of them. This could have happened if the Anglo-Saxons perceived themselves to be so socially superior to the ‘barbarians’ that Celtic words would have been seen as ‘gutter-speak’. Or there could have been avoidance for the opposite reason: because many Celts would have become highly Romanized (for the Romans were in the country for the best part of 400 years), perhaps the Anglo-Saxons perceived them as ‘nouveau riche’ and wished to distance themselves from such ‘posh’ speech. Either factor could have been relevant, in different times and places.

Then again, a completely different line of reasoning might have been involved. Perhaps the two ways of life were so similar that the Anglo-Saxons already had all the words they needed. Celtic words which the Anglo-Saxons might most usefully have adopted might already have come into their language from Latin because of the Roman presence in Europe.

In a blog post some years ago, Katherine Connor Martin wrote: ‘Irish origins lurk in some unexpected corners of the English lexicon, where the connection to Ireland itself has been obscured.’ Some of those connections are hinted at in Séamas Moylan’s 2009 work Southern Irish English, which says that most Irish words retained in Irish English come from ‘quasi-technical and affective areas of the vocabulary’.

The former group includes báinín ‘flannel’, bairín breac ‘currant cake’, bodhrán ‘winnowing drum’, bóithrín ‘by-road’, cis ‘wicker basket’, currach ‘canvas-covered boat’, gríosach ‘embers’, láí ‘spade’, poitín ‘illicit whiskey’, práiscín ‘bag apron’, préataí-s ‘potatoes’, ráth ‘ringfort’, síbín ‘speakeasy’, sleán ‘turf spade’, and súgán ‘hay-rope’. The latter includes the insults amadán ‘fool’, balbhán ‘dummy’, bodach ‘lout’, and straoill ‘slattern’.

Moylan quotes P. L. Henry’s 1958 Linguistic Survey of Ireland saying Irish English was ‘changing considerably’ and that its Irish element was ‘tending more and more to be shed or left unutilized’. Even so, the small sample above suggests fruitful routes of crossover, with many such terms still used particularly in rural parts and among older generations.

Moylan wraps up with a long passage on Irish words and phrases that have become established in ‘General English’, some more stereotypical than others, such as banshee, bard, broc, brogue (< Irish barróg), carrigeen, colcannon, crannóg, drumlin, esker, keen (< caoineadh), rapparee, shamrock, shillelagh, sláinte, slew (< slua), tory, and turlough.

Pogue ma hone, from Irish póg mo thón ‘kiss my arse’, is among the most stereotypical. Yet, as Moylan notes, it’s ‘probably a translation of the E phrase, since the Ir. form is not heard among native speakers’. I’ve never heard the phrase from an Irish person in either tongue, nor used it myself: it is a marked ‘Oirishism’, like ‘Begorrah’ and ‘Top o’ the morning to ya’, existing here only ironically and on tourist merchandise, in my experience.

The OED has a page of resources on Irish English, where you can submit words for consideration. This is part of a much broader effort to document more vocabulary from ‘World Englishes’ – an enticing project for anyone looking to delve deeper. Oxford Languages has also uploaded a series of videos from its 2022 symposium on World English.

[The Sentence first archives have lots more on Irish English and the OED.]

*

* The desire to reverse this perceived bias has sometimes been taken to misguided extremes, as described by Grant Barrett and explored at length on the cassidyslangscam blog.

One of my pet linguistic topics is Irish English dialect, which I explored at length in an essay a while back. Here are 10 words, usages, and grammatical features characteristic of English as it’s used in Ireland.

Links point to previous blog posts with more discussion on usage, origins, and so on.

1. Grand is a popular adjective/interjection in Ireland to express modest satisfaction, approval, wellbeing, or simply acknowledgement. It’s handy for understatement and not overdoing one’s enthusiasm, but in certain situations it can be a biteen (see below) ambiguous.

2. ­–een is a common suffix, borrowed from Irish –ín /iːn/, normally applied to something small, endearing, or beloved. It’s often appended to loved ones’ names: Nora → Noreen. You may know it from Irish words that spread internationally, like boreen, carrageen, shebeen, or smithereens.

3. A culchie is someone from the Irish countryside (or a small town or village), especially from a Dubliner’s point of view. It began as a derogatory stereotype – think hick or bumpkin – but it’s now often used as an affectionate tribal badge. There are a lot of theories about its origin.

4. Haitch /heɪtʃ/, not ‘aitch’, is how Irish people pronounce the letter ‘h’. Historically this shibboleth carried a lot of cultural and political baggage, as well as attracting grumbles (and worse) from linguistic purists. It’s on the rise in British English.

5. Codding is joking or fooling. It can be transitive (I’m only codding you) and intransitive (I’m only codding). There’s also the nouns cod ‘joke, hoax’ and codology, with the learned suffix –ology added by some codder. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with fish.

6. Do be, be’s: These are ways to mark habitual aspect in Irish English. Maybe because Irish has a form of habitual be, Irish people, when English was forced on them, devised ways to convey it, including ‘do be’ and ‘be’s’: The cat does be [or be’s] out rambling most nights.

7. Bold has a special sense of ‘naughty, mischievous’ in Irish English, often in reference to children. In my experience it’s more common than the standardized English sense of bold = brave, daring, though the distinction isn’t always clear-cut. Irish dána straddles the two senses.

8. The cut of you: The cut of someone is an informal idiom that refers to a person’s state or appearance, which typically has something obviously wrong with it. It can be the speaker themselves: Look at the cut of me! The tone is usually critical in an amused vein.

9. Ye, youse, and yiz are second-person plural pronouns used all over Ireland; ye is favoured in the west, but I use youse too. We inflect and affix them to fit our needs: yeers, youse’ll, yizzer (= plural your, via yiz). I’d be lost without them, y’all. (We can’t use ye that way.)

10. On foot of is a more formal phrase that means ‘as a result of’ or ‘on the basis of’. It’s not heard much in everyday speech but is routine in legal/managerial contexts and journalism, particularly crime and business reporting: The FTSE slumped on foot of US jobs news.

My previous set of Irishisms featured the after perfect, amn’t, bulling, cnáimhseáil, feck, fierce, fooster, notions, oxter, plámás, sleeveen, and till. The first collection featured acushla machree, asthore, cat, give out, hames, moryah, smacht, thick, and yoke.

Some of these occur in other dialects – ‘haitch’ in Australian English, for example – but they all mark Irish English and collectively help characterize the dialect. I’ve made notes on a couple of other Hiberno-English usages and hopefully will get around to them next year.

I was recently approached by the Irish Independent newspaper for comment on the influence of American English and pop culture on Irish English speech.

The resulting article, by journalist Tanya Sweeney, focuses on the words people use to address their mother: mam, mum, mom, ma, and so on. It says the rise of mom in Ireland joins ‘other Americanisms that have now slipped into the lexicographical stream’.

The choice of a neutral and natural metaphor – that of slipping into a stream – is welcome, since this kind of linguistic influence is so often framed negatively, as a phenomenon of invasion or corruption. Americanisms are also regularly treated with condescension.

In Ireland we often say mam or its long form, mammy.* But the Irish words for these, mam /mɒm/ and mamaí /ˈmɒmi/, have an initial vowel sound more or less identical to that in mom. Those links point to Foclóir.ie, which has audio files in the three main Irish dialects: Connacht (C), Munster (M), and Ulster (U).†

So the case of mom is tricky in Ireland, because that pronunciation could be from outside influence or – especially in western counties – it could be directly from Irish. Whatever its provenance, mom has a mid-Atlantic ring to many ears here, and the paucity of ‘mam’ cards is keenly felt in the run-up to Mother’s Day:

My quotes in the Irish Independent article are more general, and I reproduce the relevant paragraphs below. But if you’re reading this you’re likely to find the whole article of some interest. (If you can’t access it, there’s an archived version here.)

Yet some believe the American invasion is slightly exaggerated. “The American influence on speech patterns in Ireland is relatively strong because of the country’s outsize presence in films and TV and in digital culture, including social media,” observes language writer Stan Carey.

“But the effect is modest compared with how much people’s language is shaped by their family and peers. We just notice it more when it differs from our own or from traditional norms. Whenever there’s any social or cultural exchange, the influence works both ways. There are words and idioms in US English that were borrowed directly from Irish English decades or centuries ago.

“Some people’s accents are fairly stable over their lifetime, but mixed accents are more common now than they used to be — mostly because people move around much more, and most of that moving is from rural to urban areas.

“When we talk about Americanisms, neologisms, and language change in general, we tend to focus on pet hates, the words and expressions and pronunciations that annoy us,” Carey adds. “We may be troubled by the idea that our language, which is such an intimate part of our identity, is being homogenised or degraded. It’s a natural reaction.

“But languages change all the time, in every imaginable way — the only languages that aren’t changing are dead ones. And slang changes especially quickly.”

The line about mixed and stable accents is taken from a previous Irish Independent article I was quoted in (archived version here). Sweeney also spoke with a couple of linguists I recommended, and there’s some discussion of the importance for teenagers of experimenting with language.

One lexical difference cited is soda vs mineral. Soda is used patchily in the US, and I wonder too about mineral in Ireland. At sports matches as a child, I would hear traders call out, ‘Chocolate, sweets, and minerals’, and I used the word myself. But now I say soft drink or fizzy drink.

*

* One survey (n = 1,200) breaks it down as follows: 31% mam, 23% mum, 12% mom, 12% mammy, 4% first name, and there is considerable regional variation.

† Not to be confused with Irish English dialects or accents.

[image via Wikipedia]

A round-up of linguistic items – essays, news, blog posts, papers, and podcasts on language – for your enjoyment and diversion:

Learning Na’vi.

On plurals of hapax.

Birds in English place names.

A selection of Irish-language slang.

Unpacking the Madeline Kripke Collection.

Neutralizing the accents of call centre workers.

The unexpected joys of Denglisch and Berlinglish.

History of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (podcast, 30 min.).

The benefits for children of reading for pleasure.

The Hand of Irulegi and the origins of Basque.

Linguistic behaviour at the end of life.

You are not a (stochastic) parrot.

A history of politically correct.

Translators’ battle for recognition.

New SI prefixes: ronna, ronto, quetta, quecto.

Why the NYT dropped its titular diamond period.

How a Mexican magazine adopted inclusive language.

Microsoft switches typefaces from Calibri to Aptos.

Labov’s rabbit and the language of children.

Speak For Yersel: a website on Scots.*

What a racist slur does to the body.

How should we abbreviate usual?

Sleep like a . . . hedge?

Complex vowels.

Advice on commas.

It’s giving [X]: a new slang idiom.

A brief, comic history of Cork accents.

Y’all is ‘the best of the American vernacular’.

Sally Rooney on reading (and misreading) Ulysses.

Grambank: a database of grammatical patterns and diversity.

Latin, the undead language (podcast, 24 min.).

Nominative determinism in hospital medicine.

What to call literary chapter summaries?

Throwing shade at schadenfreude.

Changing accents in Irish media.

The language of dystopia (podcast, 1 hr).

Denotation IO: on meaning and computation.

A history of Irish place names (podcast, 20 min.).

*

[archive of language links]

*

* Based on research done for the Scots Syntax Atlas.

‘Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.’ (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

Banjaxed and bockety are a fun pair of words in the Irish English vernacular. Banjaxed I heard from an early age; bockety was not in my west-of-Ireland dialect, but I adopted it later for occasional use.

The words have similar but distinct meanings.

If something is banjaxed, it’s ruined, broken, confounded, or shattered (including in the ‘tired’ sense; cf. killed in Irish slang). It’s often applied to damaged or destroyed machines – vehicles, phones, computers, household appliances – or their parts. It can apply to people, if they’re injured or drunk, for example, or to abstractions like plans or systems.

If something is bockety, it’s physically unsteady, impaired, or imperfect. It’s more likely to be usable than if it’s banjaxed: a bockety chair or bicycle might wobble but function, whereas a banjaxed one is not to be trusted, if it can be used at all. Body parts are often bockety too. I’ll return to this word later.

This car in David Mach‘s installation The Oligarch’s Nightmare, pictured at the Galway Arts Festival 2023, is well and truly banjaxed. And that wheel looks fierce bockety.

The origins of banjaxed (occasionally bandjaxed) are uncertain. The OED says it was ‘perhaps originally Dublin slang’, which doesn’t get us far, while the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang speculates that it was formed by association with banged, bashed, and smashed. Maybe.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang suggests that the noun banjax was a semi-euphemism of ballocks. Dave Wilton, at Wordorigins.org, writes that it’s a short leap from ballocks as a verb meaning ‘make a mess’ to banjax with a similar sense. (See my post on ballocks/bollocks/bollox/bollix at Strong Language for more on that word.)

Banjax(ed) has always felt vaguely rude to me, bordering obscurely on vulgarity; etymology might underlie this feeling. There’s also a bilingual pun about banjax being the ladies’ toilet, since bean /’bæn/ is Irish Gaelic for ‘woman’, and jacks is Irish English slang for ‘bathroom’.

The noun banjax, which may predate the verb, appears in Seán Ó Casey’s 1920s play Juno and the Paycock: ‘I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ th’ Will.’ Wiktionary defines it as ‘a mess or undesirable situation made as a result of incompetence’ – I’d qualify the subordinate phrase with a ‘sometimes’.

Banjax (v.) appears in a few major dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Green’s, and Collins, which notes the common connotations of incompetence. It usually occurs in the form banjaxed (i.e., as a past participle or participial adjective). Some Irish writers are especially fond of it, like Edna O’Brien:

Van Gogh knew a thing or two, but think what it did to his brain, banjaxed it. (Johnny I Hardly Knew You)

‘Emma had suggested that you hide, said your presence might banjax her position.’ (A Pagan Place)

‘Say the separating machine got banjaxed up at the creamery,’ Morgan said. (‘Tough Men’, in The Love Object)

and Flann O’Brien:

The torture had him banjaxed altogether. (The Hard Life)

‘Michael Gilhaney,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?’ (The Third Policeman)

They drive away the roller and here is his black heart sitting there as large as life in the middle of the pulp of his banjaxed corpse. They couldn’t crush his heart! (At Swim-Two-Birds)

Green’s has further citations, mostly from Irish writers.

Mark Davies’s GloWbE corpus highlights banjax* as an example of Irish dialect: 59 of its 77 hits are from Irish English, 52 of them for banjaxed. And of the 16 British ones, several are duplicates or appear on Arseblog, a blog about Arsenal football club written by an Irishman.

Banjaxed shows up in Scottish English too, sometimes in high-profile places. In the rebooted Star Trek film from 2009, Scotty describes the shield emitters as ‘totally banjaxed’.

Banjaxed objects in GloWbE include body parts (my arm, my right knee, her knees, Robbie Keane’s Achilles heel), machines and tech (websites, rental bikes, a car), and physical objects (bed, door lock). Anatomical/medical references proved popular in the pandemic, as the Coronavirus Corpus shows:

I was as banjaxed by the coronavirus as anyone else. [source, NZ]

But there undoubtedly are a number of people whose lives have been banjaxed by the thing. [source]

That means tens of thousands of those will go on to be rendered banjaxed by Long Covid. [source]

Most of all, abstract entities are banjaxed, often of a political or structural nature: Ireland, the country, the economy, our banking system, the country’s accounts, etc. Country is the most frequent collocate: ‘the country is banjaxed’, ‘the party that banjaxed the country’, etc.

Finally, a fun piece of trivia: banjaxed was Terry Wogan’s favourite word:

Which explains this:

*

Now for bockety. Loaned directly from Irish bacaidí /’bɑkəd̪i/, it’s a synonym of bacach /’bɑkəx/, both of which, as far as I know, can function as an adjective, meaning ‘lame’, ‘halting’, ‘imperfect’, or as a noun, meaning ‘lame person’ (or ‘mean person’, ‘sponger’, etc.).

The adjectival use of bockety is more common, and is the only use listed in the OED. The first of two closely related senses is dated to 1842, the second to 1902, though I doubt that’s the final word:

1. Of a person: unable to walk without difficulty; infirm, lame. Also of a body part: injured, impaired.

2. That has fallen into a state of disrepair; likely to fall apart or break down; rickety, ramshackle.

A search on Irish forum boards.ie shows the popularity of reference to body parts: there are bockety legs, knees, feet, hips, backs, ovaries, heads, teeth, and entire bodies. There’s often a sense of long-term impairment or gradual deterioration, whereas a banjaxed body part tends to indicate a more sudden or severe injury. At least that’s my intuition.

Bockety often refers to everyday objects, such as wheels, bicycles, furniture, or other parts of a home that have fallen into disrepair but may remain functional. If only barely: Mary McAleese, president of Ireland in 1997–2011, writes in her memoir of ‘a bockety office chair’ that would ‘lurch suddenly to the left and throw me onto the floor’.

OED aside, bockety is absent from mainstream dictionaries but appears in Irish English ones, whose examples refer to a bockety sign, chair leg, and hay rick (A Dictionary of Hiberno-English by T.P. Dolan) and a bockety wardrobe, pig’s bladder (used as a football), and hoor (a quasi-derogatory term usually applied to men) (Slanguage by Bernard Share).

I last saw it in the wild a few weeks ago, when I caught up on a long, comic article about the Metaverse in New York Magazine by Paul Murray, author of the award-winning Skippy Dies and The Bee Sting:

. . . the unlovable lo-fi graphics and interpersonal randomness can give Horizon Worlds a kind of a perverse, bockety charm. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, there’s no scope to broadcast your brand here; everybody’s just thrown together, like at a ’90s music festival with no music.

Other examples that I’ve seen by Irish authors include:

The door had been wedged open by a bockety chair on which was sellotaped a hand-scrawled sign: ART THIS WAY. (Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat)

I won’t see you riding your bockedy bike (Pat Ingoldsby, ‘For Hughie’, in Salty Water)

. . . we were admitted to a room that felt like an oul’ one’s tiny parlour: a red formica-topped table, a couple of battered kitchen chairs, the smell of cooking oil and boiled cabbage and stale smoke, an old Bakelite radio set on a bocketty occasional table.” (Declan Hughes, All the Dead Voices)

You may have noticed the three spellings (bockety, bockedy, bocketty) in those three uses: a not unusual degree of variation in an anglicized Irish loanword – see my post on mar dhea for notes on this.

GloWbE has just 4 hits for bockety (none for the variant spellings), referring to spectacles, roads, and pop music (bockety pop is a microgenre I’m unfamiliar with). The iWeb corpus has 18, though 8 refer to the Sarah Argent play The Bockety World of Henry & Bucket, about ‘two friends who live in a bockety world of discarded objects’.

Also featured in iWeb are a bockety shopping cart, table, framework, cage, beads, stairs, mobile phone, and bicycle – which is banjaxed too: Róisín Ingle’s Irish Times article on cycling begins thus:

I’ve been freewheeling around Dublin town since the red letter day aged eight or nine when I inherited a thoroughly banjaxed third-hand bike that once had belonged to several older brothers or sisters. It was blue and bockety, the saddle leather battered and worn, the chain creaky and in need of a good dose of 3-in-1 oil, but it was mine, all mine.

Which brings us full, bockety circle. To see us out, here’s a video of a dog named Bockety and their pal helping a farmer plant potatoes in County Kerry. Absolute full marks for Irishness.