The fine art of speaking like a local

In his excellent book, 'Death Sentence,' Australian speech writer Don Watson mourns the death of the English language in Australia, killed off by bureaucrats and advertising executives alike.  He writes:

'Ireland remains a place where there is pleasure in hearing public language spoken.  It is a pocket of resistance in the empire of the English language.  On the upholstery of Aer Lingus planes, slices of Ulysses and poems have been embroidered.  William Butler Yeats's 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' spills over the back of the seat in front of you - truly a beautiful arrangement of words. With the plane going down, what would you like to enter your head in the moment before you realise death is coming at a thousand miles an hour, Hugh Grant, or:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the heart's deep core.

On the planes and in Irish airports, announcements are made in full, flowing sentences with living words; passengers may close their eyes and think they are arriving in a hay-wain.  The words draw you in, at least partly because the speaker appears to take pleasure in speaking them.'

Watson's words were written in 2003 and they struck a chord with me then.  By that time, I had already visited Ireland several times, and had always felt at home, with the country, its people, and their love of the spoken word. In 2015, I sit in my new living room, within a stone's throw of W.B Yeat's final resting place, and in the 150th year since his birth. And I sincerely hope that the least relevant part of the passage above is the reference to Hugh Grant.

I am sure that Ireland has not been immune in recent years, and that bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo has slowly infiltrated the Irish use of English. (Of course, this can in no way be compared with the displacement of the beautiful Irish language by the English language itself, a point that is not covered by Watson, and one which I am also not qualified to discuss). That point aside, from an outsider's perspective, there is still poetry everywhere, including in common words and phrases spoken daily. Here are just a few of my favourites, with no surprise that the weather features prominently in some of them:

'I have a strong weakness for chocolate/coffee' (substitute vice of choice)

'I'm just after doing it/telling you'  (I've just finished doing it/telling you)

'Gone Doolally'  (Gone mad, as in 'Those young wans have gone Doolally for Ed Sheeran)

'Wee dote' (good child, of kind disposition)

'It's a nice soft morning' (Translation: 'It's been raining since 2 am with no sign of letting up any time soon)

'There's a nice long stretch in the evenings'  (Translation:  It is no longer dark at 3.30 pm and before you know it, it'll be summer, when it won't be dark until midnight)

'Sure if it isn't'...(to begin a sentence)....and...

'.....so it is'  (to end a sentence).   Contrary to the popular view of many Australians, the Irish do not go around saying 'To be Sure, To be Sure'  (or 'Potatoes!!') after every sentence.  I have only ever heard 'To be Sure To be Sure' said once and it was completely in context- the woman in the print shop was going to print something twice for me, to be sure (and sure again).  There is, however, still room to begin and end a sentence with superfluous words that somehow add rather than detract from any conversation.

'Ah, would you stop'  (I have struggled a bit with this one, but in context it seems to mean 'you must be kidding/well aren't you the one for stating the bleeding obvious?'  For example,  Question: 'Have you any sweets left over since Christmas'  Answer 'Ah, would you stop'.  It usually has the desired effect, as you do stop, and move onto some other, less controversial conversation, usually about the weather).

And, my personal favourite:

'he could hear a fly fart on Knocknarea'  (Translation- he had excellent hearing...you can probably guess that it's very windy at the top of that mountain).

So, there you have it, a good turn of phrase is still alive and well in the North West of Ireland.  I am sure there are a lot more fantastic phrases out there that I am yet to pick up.  And when I do, I am sure they will be grand, so they will.