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Not a notion about Irish notions
‘The Talking Trees’ by Seán Ó Faoláin is the opening story in the anthology Body and Soul: Irish Short Stories of Sexual Love, edited by David Marcus and published by Poolbeg Press in 1979. It’s a...
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Irish doublethink and unknown knowns
A couple of excerpts from Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009), a fine polemic by the Irish critic and author Fintan O’Toole: One of the great strengths of Irish...
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Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr): let the world I knew become the space between the words that I had by heart and all the other speech that always was...
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When weather means time in Irish English
Ireland has a curious expression whereby this weather is used to mean “these days”. It normally occurs at the end of a clause or sentence, though it doesn’t have to. It’s a very colloquial phrase, more...
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10 words used only in Irish English
God forgive me, I’ve written a listicle. Below are ten words and usages in Irish English (or Hiberno-English*) that you mightn’t be familiar with unless you’re a Sentence first veteran, a dialect...
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Gaustering about the meaning of ‘gosther’
In Seán Ó Faoláin’s novel Bird Alone (1936) the narrator, a young boy, is waiting alone in town for his grandfather: After shivering under the thatch of a cabin-end for an hour I began to search for...
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Subject contact clauses in Irish English
Everyone came home from England was questioned. (Timothy O’Grady, I Could Read the Sky) Contact clauses are dependent clauses attached directly to their antecedent, i.e., without any relative pronoun....
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Sleeveen language in Ireland
In an article in the Irish Independent this week on privatisation fears and political shenanigans, Gene Kerrigan used a great word borrowed (and anglicised) from the Gaelic: Is it really okay for the...
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Southern Irish accent judged ‘most attractive’
A couple of days ago I tweeted this: Irish accent voted most attractive in British Isles + Ireland (n=2018) https://t.co/smOb8i5oQI via @VoxHiberionacum pic.twitter.com/bYgHnOsiQx — Stan Carey...
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‘Making strange’ in Ireland
Claire Keegan’s superb novella Foster, expanded from a short story published in the New Yorker in 2010, has an idiom I remember hearing in childhood and only seldom since. The book’s narrator is a...
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Do be doing be’s: habitual aspect in Irish English
She be’s out on that bike every Sunday They do be up late chatting Everyone knows about grammatical tense – it involves placing a situation in time, using inflections and auxiliaries to mark temporal...
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Colour words and archaisms in rural Donegal
Red hair is strongly associated with Irish people on account of how common it is here. Less well known, at least outside the island, is that the Irish language has one word, rua, for the red of red...
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Foostering around with an Irish word
Fooster is one of those words much loved in Hiberno-English but largely restricted to it, not having crossed to wider dialects as galore and smithereens did.* Derived from Irish fústar /’fuːst̪ər/, and...
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Ye, youse and yiz in Irish English speech
In modern standard English, you as second person pronoun serves a multitude of purposes: singular and plural, subject and object, formal and informal. It wasn’t always so. Centuries ago the language...
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How gender-neutral is ‘guys’, you guys?
Guy has followed an improbable path from its origin as an eponym for Guy Fawkes to its common and versatile use today. It’s increasingly popular as a term to address mixed-gender and all-female groups,...
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The Hot News or After Perfect in Irish English
A characteristic feature of English grammar in Ireland is the so-called after perfect, also known as the hot news perfect or the immediate perfective. Popular throughout Ireland yet unfamiliar to most...
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Up to your oxters in Gaelic expressions
Up to your oxters (or my oxters, etc.) is a phrase I often heard growing up in County Mayo in Ireland. Oxter means ‘armpit’, normally, so up to your oxters means ‘up to your armpits’ – whether...
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A fierce popular usage in Ireland
The adjective fierce has a range of overlapping meanings that convey aggression, savagery, intensity, and so on (fierce dog/battle/debate/storm), reflecting its origin in Latin ferus ‘wild, untamed’....
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12 words peculiar to Irish English
Irish people are known for having a way with words. Sometimes it’s true and sometimes it isn’t, but either way we first need the words to have a chance of having our way with them. And some words, like...
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Irishly having tea
Passing through the pleasingly named town of Gort on my way to the Burren recently, I popped in to a second-hand bookshop and picked up a couple of Brian Moore books I hadn’t read: Catholics and The...
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