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Genderally speaking
August 2011 was “gender English” month at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, and a few of my recent posts there focus on this aspect of the language. In “Problems with pronouns”, I address the issue of...
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What do you wonder at, asthore?
Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o’er Hill and vale puts out the day— What do you wonder at, asthore, What’s away in yonder grey? Dark the eyes that linger long— Dream-fed heart, awake, come in, Warm the...
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‘Ledgebag’ is totes amaze
‘Are you leaving your curlers in, Dot, till it starts?’ Eithne Duggan asked her friend. ‘Oh def.,’ Doris O’Beirne said. She wore an assortment of curlers — white pipe-cleaners, metal clips, and pink,...
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Come here till I tell you about ‘till’ in Ireland
Till (= until) has an extra sense in Irish English that means something like “in order that” or “so that [someone] can…”. A doting relative, upon meeting you after a long absence, might say “Come here...
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Mar dhea, moryah — a sceptical Irish interjection
The Irish phrase mar dhea /mɑr’jæ/, /mɑrə’jæ/ “mor ya” is characteristic of Irish English speech. It’s a sceptical interjection used to cast doubt, dissent or derision (or all three) on whatever phrase...
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The meanings and origins of ‘feck’
Look away now if curse words bother you. Feck is a popular minced oath in Ireland, occupying ground between the ultra-mild expletive flip and the often taboo (but also popular) fuck. It’s strongly...
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Making a hames of it
The word hame is usually found in the plural: hames are two curved wooden or metal pieces forming part of the collar of a draught animal’s harness; they fit around the neck and the traces are fastened...
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Irish Folk Furniture, a stop-motion documentary
Irish Folk Furniture is a stop-motion documentary, 8½ minutes long, that won an award for animation at the Sundance Film Festival last month. Director Tony Donoghue thought it might be too specialist...
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Story Bud? A video of Dublin phrases, with notes
Story Bud? is a fun video by Jenny Keogh that’s doing the rounds. It’s a rapid-fire two-minute clip of Dublin slang and colloquial expressions. They’re not all peculiar to Dublin – some are heard...
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Dialect query: The head of/on/to him
Regular commenter John Cowan has a question on non-standard phrases, and hopes Sentence first readers can shed some light on it: I’d like some information from native speakers of Hiberno-English, the...
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Living under a hen
Alice Taylor’s Quench the Lamp is a warm and funny memoir of her childhood in rural Cork in the 1940s, full of anecdotes and observations on farm activities, family dramas, eccentric neighbours, and...
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Story Bud? Funding the feature film
Remember Story Bud?, the video of Irish slang and colloquialisms I shared here in February? Director Jenny Keogh has filmed a second clip, How’s About Ye?, in the same style, and it’s great fun...
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Bulling “ar buile” in Irish English
In Ireland, to be bulling means to be angry – typically in a visible and maybe voluble way, and sometimes with comical connotations.1 I used to hear it now and then in my childhood and teens, but...
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Yoke, thingamajig, doodad, and oojamaflip: meet the placeholders
I have a guest post up at A Thing About Words, the blog of Merriam-Webster Unabridged, on the curious subject of placeholder words: What sort of yoke is that thingamajig? Placeholder words, as you’ll...
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Giving out, Irish style
The phrasal verb give out has several common senses: distribute – “she gave out free passes to the gig” emit – “the machine gave out a distinctive hum” break down, stop working – “at the end of the...
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Acushla machree, pulse of my heart
Browsing Daniel O’Keeffe’s First Book of Irish Ballads yesterday (Mercier Press, 1955), I came upon this verse in ‘Song from the Backwoods’ by T. D. Sullivan: And well we know in the cool grey eyes,...
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An aitch or a haitch? Let’s ’ear it.
The oddly named letter H is usually pronounced “aitch” /eɪtʃ/ in British English, but in Ireland we tend to aspirate it as “haitch” /heɪtʃ/. In my biology years I would always have said “a HLA marker”,...
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This blog post is cat melodeon
A distinctive feature of the English spoken in Ireland is the colloquial use of cat as an adjective to mean: awful, unpleasant, rough, terrible, bad, calamitous, or very disappointing. I heard it a lot...
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Clishmaclaver, mar dhea
The usual meaning of the Scottish word clishmaclaver (also clish-ma-claver, clishmaclaiver, clashmaclaver) is “idle talk, gossip, or empty chatter”. The OED says it was formed “apparently with allusion...
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Lip-sync surrealism in Soupy Norman and Couched
Few people outside Ireland are likely to have seen Soupy Norman, a cult comedy that aired in 2007 on our national station RTÉ. Essentially, Soupy uses footage from a Polish soap opera and turns it into...
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