Isn’t It Well for Ye? The Book of Irish Mammies
That’s More of It Now:
The Second Book of Irish Mammies
It’s Earlier ’Tis Getting:
The Christmas Book of Irish Mammies
TRANSWORLD IRELAND PUBLISHERS
28 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
www.transworldireland.ie
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the UK and Ireland by Transworld Ireland Publishers
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Colm O’Regan 2016
Illustrations © Twisteddoodles 2016
Colm O’Regan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473540507
ISBN 9781848272286
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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BOLLOXOLOGY – WE’VE ALL heard the word and once you hear it you remember it. It contains a number of pleasing /ɒ/ sounds as all the best words do, like ‘toss’, ‘nob’ and ‘How are ya, HORSE?’ But what does it mean?
It’s a very powerful word, a useful gateway into understanding modern Ireland. Think of it as being a combination of bullshit, codology and oul talk. It’s infused with a subtle blend of notions, a touch of misplaced arrogance and smidgens of devilment.
The word itself sounds a little condemnatory but it needn’t be. Don’t worry – we all indulge in a spot of bolloxology. Doing something bolloxological doesn’t make you a bollox, just like engaging in codology does not make you a deep-sea North Atlantic fish. But it’s important to be able to identify it when presented to you.
Bolloxology can take many forms. It may be about getting served your ice-cream in a restaurant on a piece of slate. Or worse – the restaurant having no ice-cream at all on the menu (known as bolloxology by omission). Luckily, the average Irish person has an inbuilt sixth sense for bolloxology. You know that slight rage you feel when you read an article entitled ‘25 IRISH CELEBRITIES WHO ARE “KILLING IT” ON INSTAGRAM RIGHT NOW’? That’s not future-shock. That’s your bolloxological sensor going off.
Notions lie at the root of much bolloxology. For many Irish people, notions were once synonymous with having ‘notions above your station’. But that was a harsh definition, condemning any ordinary person for just trying to inject a bit of happiness in their lives with a nice jaunty hat or a non-black bicycle. Now it has been reclaimed from that classist origin. Notions today can range from a hairdresser giving you balayage when all you wanted was ‘a tidy’, to buying evoting machines that were never used.
But notions are not necessarily bad. If you didn’t have notions about your station, you would never aspire to get to another station and the basis of the economy would collapse. Where would we be if Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs hadn’t had notions?
But when those notions lose the run of themselves, allied with the bad data supplied from bolloxological assumptions, disaster can strike – namely, a hames.
This book has a bit of language in it. There’s a section on bad language but we won’t labour the point. And it’s well marked with asterisks.
For shorthand, bolloxology is sometimes written as Bx. This is just to spare you from having to stare at a load of bollox all the way through the book. You’ll also see a bit of anti-Bx – the antidotes to bolloxology which help deflate some of the nonsense that might be flying around. But there’s more Bx than anti-Bx – otherwise we’d have nothing to complain about.
At the end of the book, you will find the Bollexicon – a glossary of a few words and phrases that have seeped into our brains over the last while. If there comes a day when you open your mouth and one of these bits of Bx comes out, the Bollexicon should help you head them off at the pass. You will also meet the Humans of Bolloxology – some representatives of all of us with our funny little ways and notions.
Bolloxology is inescapable. Take this book, for example: even its very structure is bolloxological. In homage to the three-word slogan (see here) it is divided into three main sections:
• Private – how we talk and carry on among ourselves.
• Public – how we talk and carry on in the full glare of the public eye.
• Social – how we talk and carry on as if we were talking and carrying on among ourselves but are apparently unaware that, because it’s on social media, it’s actually in the full glare of the public eye.
Of course, language, behaviour and attitudes are fluid across many different categories. For example, the unique grammar of the English-speaking Irish is like a horizontal that transcends all the major verticals of the book. But mention of horizontals and verticals is exactly the kind of Bx that has led to the demands for this book to be written.
However, in honour of the bolloxology at the heart of the political system, we went with an imperfect solution to ‘get the thing out the door’ before the next election because our focus groups were telling us we needed to ‘shore up the grass roots’. And if it comes back to bite us, sure ’twon’t be me that’ll be dealing with it. I’ll be gone to Europe to take up a new job and claim a pension simultaneously. Or else I’ll have taken up a job in sports administration – which appears to be a hotbed of Bx.
WHEN I HEARD he was writing another book I thought to myself, What is he going to be telling people about me now? So, to tell you the truth, I’m glad he’s moved on from writing about me. Three books is more than enough to be giving away our secrets. I can’t go anywhere now without someone saying, Oh, the Irish Mammy does this and the Irish Mammy does that, when all I’m trying to do is buy a few spare tea-towels. Everything I do now seems to end up in some sort of a list. And I normally would be a great one for a list but not when I’m an item on it.
Now, as regards this book … I might as well come out and say it: I’m not sure about the language – especially on the cover. He tells me that it’s not a big deal now to say it but I think myself it’s only looking for attention. Exactly, Mammy, he says – you need to grab their attention in the bookshop. Well, says I, there’s no need to be crude. And then there’s more bad language further in. They’ve put in stars but I know the words they’re talking about, and again … there’s plenty of ways of saying something without resorting to that sort of thing.
But lookit, I spose he has to make a shilling out of something. The car insurance went up again, he tells me, even though he still has the no-claims bonus. ’Tis all them scam artists with their ‘whiplash’. I heard about it on Prime Time.
And the thing is, he’s old enough now to go his own way so if he wants to talk about bolloxism or whatever it’s called, leave him off. But I probably won’t leave the book lying around the house in case visitors would see it. There’d be a few On My Side who would have fairly strong opinions about that kind of a thing.
MUCH HAS BEEN written about Hiberno-English. A lot of it has been immense works of scholarship, cross-referencing old texts, researching etymologies and making links with Indo-European languages and whatnot. This has not been done here, though it totally could have been, and anyway, in today’s busy world, who has time for that? Instead it’s just broad strokes and generalizations. That’ll do you grand.
The way we speak here in Ireland is a sometimes entertaining mix of our natural bent towards bolloxology and our natural resistance to it.
Years of oppression by the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Vikings, the Normans, the English, ourselves, the Church, the professional classes, the banks, the EU and finally, our phones, have had a number of effects:
• We equivocate a lot. It is difficult to give a straight answer because we’re not sure who’s asking. This vagueness in the detail can also come back to bite us when organizing a large public project and may ultimately lead to a hames (see here).
• We can be excessively modest – not taking any credit for anything, even if it was clearly proven we did it. Although we will take huge amounts of credit to buy a house at the wrong time in an economic cycle.
• There’s a chance the person asking the question might be able to pay good money for the answer. Over the years, these lucrative questioners have ranged from Redcoats with shiny sovereigns asking about ‘which blacksmith seems to be up the walls making pikes these days’ to successful businessmen idly wondering ‘how’s that competition for the big wedge of public money going, would you say?’ In such cases, a particular and indirect form of words is required. This is usually prefaced with the phrase ‘Well, you didn’t hear this from me now …’
Finally, as a small country, we are also very open to language coming in from abroad. Our social survival depends on it, in much the same way as our economy depends on our openness to huge organizations that earn billions but pay €14.25 and a packet of Monster Munch in tax. But from time to time we have enough of Bx and explode in a beautiful stream of good ‘bad language’ with a grammar all of its own.
Here is a quick tour of the Irish argot and how the Bx or anti-Bx applies.
When we don’t have enough words to fill the available space, we use a lot of filler words. These are innocuous enough in private conversation but when taken into the more public sphere, they’re usually a sign we’re hiding something – like the truth or the fact that we don’t know our arse from our elbow.
Filler words are also used when we don’t want a sentence to start too abruptly or, more importantly, when we’re trying to avoid saying something else. They can soften a blow, calm an argument or deflect a difficult question. They are a buffer zone of language.
The popularity of ‘I suppose’ is new-found, although its use is not. We’ve been ‘sposing’ for years. On occasion, ‘I spose’ has been abbreviated to the ultra-efficient ‘I boz’ and appears at the end of a sentence. The finest exponents are farmers standing in a field and conjecturing about the progress of a man driving heavy machinery. ‘He’ll hardly do both fields before the rain, I boz.’
Some advanced-level users will place it at the beginning and end of a sentence. ‘I boz the digger’ll hardly go through that gate, I boz.’ To which the reply is ‘I boz not’.
I suppose, to be fair though, ‘I suppose’ has made the leap from the gate of a field to many other fields and now peppers the speech of even the most erudite of speakers.
Sports people spend a lot of post-match interviews ‘supposing’, as a way of avoiding saying that they won because they were better than their opponents. Given that they suppose about the past, you can imagine how much supposing there is about the future. For example, the All-Ireland Final preview programmes, Up for the Match, are almost two-thirds pure supposition.
Often used in conjunction with ‘I suppose’, ‘lookit’ was originally the domain of an exasperated Mammy who was just telling the youngest to wear some sort of a coat as it was freezing out. Now you can hear it from any GAA manager who is being asked to speculate on his opponents in the next round. ‘Lookit, we’ll look at our own game first and I’m sure Kilkenny will do the same.’
We’ll explore this more deeply in the sports section (see here), but the reason for so many ‘I sposes’ and ‘lookits’ is pure bolloxology: sports people simply don’t like talking about sport, and sports broadcasters keep wanting to interview them to fill the hours of time set aside in the broadcast schedule for analysis and preview.
The way ‘so’ is used now has seeped in from abroad. It has always had lots of uses but, in the past, it would appear in the middle of a flow of conversation. For example:
• As part of the phrase ‘so that was grand’. STWG is used to connect two events in a long anecdote even if the events themselves were anything but grand. ‘He drove straight through the window, nearly up as far as the deli counter. So that was grand. Then the father came in and he was balubas as well and caught his hand on a pane of glass.’
• In recounting a ‘he says/I says’ conversation with optional turning around. ‘No,’ he says. So I turned around and says, ‘Well, you can shove your golf-night up your hole, so.’
It has now been imported to the beginning of a conversation. Sometimes it’s in a ‘look-at-me’ statement: ‘So I’m single again.’ This is a plea for attention, but the ‘so’ indicates that the pleader is being a real trooper about the whole thing. IT professionals use it to soften the blow when explaining complex concepts to idiots. ‘So, yeah, if you just click on “OK” then that should work’ or ‘So the plug goes in the wall.’ Irish politicians use ‘so’ to demonstrate their dynamism, in whatever sort-of solution they are proposing: ‘So, we’ve set up a task force and they’ll be meeting in 2018.’
Used to express a lack of surprise that what has transpired has confirmed our suspicion that we were right to have such low expectations. ‘Dhera, they were in trouble for ages. Someone said he was into the bank for a good few bob.’
The oldest ones are the best. ‘Like’ is one of these words. It’s been around for years, particularly in Cork, where it’s used as a substitute for breathing. Coincidentally, it also originated in the San Fernando Valley in California. But whereas the Valley Girl was ‘like, whatever’, the Cork girl was ‘like, allergic’. A typical conversation might include the following: ‘Like, I don’t know, like, if he likes me or not, like, like he liked my Facebook status, like, but like, that could mean anything, like.’
Some of these fillers may have been quite long phrases at one stage but over time have become fused together like a load of sticky old sweets in a bag at the back of the press.
• ‘Do you know’ becomes ‘jnaw’.
• ‘Do you know what I mean’ becomes ‘janoreamean’ in Dublin; while it has been further condensed in the countryside to ‘jahmean’, which sounds like a Rastafarian cursing his Creator’s cruelty.
You never need tell the Irish retail and food industry to live in the present. They do it all the time. Even if they’re just setting a plate down on a restaurant table or ‘getting a size ten in the black’, there is an involuntary ‘now’. ‘Now’ is short for ‘Here is the thing that you ordered. I have delivered it to you.’
It turns out that we all learned it from our parents. New parents will realize for the first time that the main use for filler words is to say something to a baby who is just staring at you like you are an idiot and they are debating whether or not to send a message to the home planet to beam them back up. That’s when we say ‘now’ to a baby.
For a country much wronged against, we do spend a lot of time apologizing profusely for some/all of the following situations, and many others besides:
• Not holding a door for someone even though they were outside the ‘holding zone’.
• Buying something in a shop with mainly coins, dropping the coins, in the end just changing your mind and handing over the €50 note, even though you definitely had €13.50 in coins because you counted it out in the biscuit aisle.
• When you are about to complain about terrible service, all the way through complaining about terrible service and even after you’ve been granted an inadequate recompense for terrible service.
Ironically, ‘sorry now’ is quite powerful: ‘Sorry now, excuse me, but that kind of behaviour is NOT acceptable. What did we say? Exactly. Well, we’re going straight home and you won’t be going to Funwaterworld again until you learn to behave.’
There are times when we’ve had enough of Bx. There are times when the enabling, the empowering and the envisioning have to be dissed, when the key drivers have to be run off the road, when those reaching out need to have their hands slapped. When the Irish snap, the language is bold and beautiful. Most of the bold words are asterisked out here so that the book doesn’t get a parental advisory sticker on the cover. This in itself is a load of Bx. It’s supposed to protect children. These are the same children who are browsing in the bookshop for a novel about a post-apocalyptic world where all the parents are dead and the children have to fight to save the human race from a nameless evil. These are the same children who’ll have all the worst words and who laugh into their sleeves when you look up from reading about a court-case and say, ‘I don’t understand; what’s the big deal with teabagging? I mean it’s not as nice as loose tea but still … Although I don’t understand why they’d be doing it in a jeep.’
Anyway, we asterisked the offending words out just to be on the safe side. Because when we get annoyed, we get some new grammar – a huge body of grammar.
It should be in the guide books, really. We have a lot of words for ‘very’ and a lot of them would be unexpected to tourists. To avoid confusion, or in some cases offence, here are most of them in one place: mighty, fierce, ferocious, savage, quare, fair, wile, wicked, dead, awful, terrible, massive, pure. The bolloxology is that these are being eroded by Americanisms such as ‘soooo’, ‘waayyy’ and the one that causes me to whiten my knuckles and shout into a cushion: ‘much’. As in ‘Overreacting much, Colm?’
You could write a whole book about Irish swearing with a hundred pages devoted to the use of the word ‘f*ck’ alone – a word we have embraced very keenly. We could deal with the c-word as well but it would be nice to have some chance of getting this book discussed on afternoon telly, so that chapter will be left to Bolloxology Redux – a handsome, leather-bound edition costing a huge amount of money that contains very little you didn’t already know from the copy you got in the library.
The main contribution to the pantheon of f*ck from this part of the world is ‘to f*ck’. Its incredible prevalence would suggest the Irish are getting a savage amount of sex but actually it’s just a replacement for other words or a full stop. In this context, when used at the end of a sentence ‘to f*ck’ means to a non-specific location that isn’t the current location. It is often used as a response to ‘f*ck-acting around’ (a physical form of bolloxology characterized by a lack of efficiency and directness in one’s actions).
Examples include: ‘C’mon away to f*ck’/‘Gway to f*ck’/‘Leh ih inta f*ck’ – the last being a supporter’s plea for a fancy dan footballer to cut out the fancy dan stuff and send the ball into ‘the mixer’ in a more timely fashion.
‘To f*ck’ is sometimes just used for the f*ck of it. Honest to f*ck it is. Anyway, we’ll carry on to the next section, to f*ck.fn1
One of the key features of Irish-English is that it is spoken by people who are cautious – especially men. For Irish men, the hardest thing to do is greet another man face-on. Therefore, the initial few minutes of any interaction have to contain absolutely nothing in the line of information. This is a prime example of bolloxology by omission, as the following conversation shows:
Man 1: ‘Well …’
Man 2: ‘How are you?’
Man 1: ‘How’re things?’
Man 2: ‘How’d ye get on?’
Man 1: ‘Ah … shur, you know yourself.’
Man 2: ‘Shur, who are ya tellin’?’
This could go on for another few minutes unless there is another action to be performed:
Man 1: ‘Pint?’
Man 2: ‘F*ckitgwanso.’
Or another person enters the group – although the ritual may have to be repeated:
Man 3: ‘How’re the men?’
Man 1/Man 2: ‘Ah, would ya look who it is?’
Man 3: ‘Hard at it, are ye?’
Man 1: ‘What would you know about hard work?’
The silent voice is what is really meant by what is actually said. It’s like a dog whistle for humans but instead of a high-pitched sound, it’s those unspoken words directed at you and your oul talk.
The conversation between a returned emigrant and the person who stayed can be laden with subtext, with neither side saying overtly what they want to say, even though they may be screaming inside, as the following example shows:
‘I thought it was you, all right. Well, how’re you getting on – over in LA, is it?’
‘San Fran, actually.’ He knows well where I am. I told him before. Keeps getting it wrong just to show he doesn’t give a shite where I am.
‘San Francisco, bedads.’ San Fran he says. F*ckin’ San Fran. He’s out there two minutes and he has all the lingo now about it. ‘You like it out there?’ I hope he doesn’t.
‘Oh yeah. It’s just a different world, you know?’ Not a world for the likes of you anyway. With your Penneys polo shirt and your Barratts shoes.
‘Who are you working for? Google or Facebook, I suppose. One a them Silicon Valley crowds, I suppose.’ God, I hope Silicon Valley is in San Francisco.
‘No, you wouldn’t have heard of them – Softoid. But we’re on the same campus, actually. All part of one ecosystem.’ Why did I say ‘ecosystem’, feck’s sake? That’ll be all over the parish by tomorrow. I’ll have to replatform my language. [Laughs internally]
‘Eco-system’? The clown – always was full of it. ‘Softoid. I don’t know them. Must be a small crowd, are they? Wan a them start-ups?’ Probably fly-by-nights. Thank f*ck he’s not with Google. I’d never hear the end of it from the father. Shur, I know what he was doing – wasn’t I looking up the photos on Facebook of him going around in a driverless car or whatever the f*ck.
‘Actually it’s got a market cap of thirty billion but it’s very much under the radar. But you’ll hear about it, I’d say, when it IPOs. The CAPEX on our B2B model for SMEs is attracting a lot of VC interest. The NASDAQ is going to go nuts for it.’ That’s it now. I can never come home again.
‘CAPEX, yeah, they go stone mad for the CAPEX, all right.’ The tool. ‘You must be on big money out there.’ I hope he’s not but I know he is. Tell us how many shares you’re getting. Go on, put us out of our misery.
‘Haha. It’s a good living. But you know, long hours so … Would you not think of going out there yourself?’ If you can tear yourself away from Saturday nights in O’Dwyers.
‘Ah, no. Wouldn’t be for the likes of me.’ I’m fine and happy where I am, or at least I was until you walked in.
‘I’d say you’d like it. It’s real active. We go skiing every weekend in the winter and then it’s a short drive to the ocean for surfing. It’s not just staying in the pub.’ I just want you to approve of what I’m doing, it’s not a competition. Well, maybe it is actually. You thought you were the dog’s bollox when we were seventeen. Well, who’s winning now?
‘Skiing. Begor. There won’t be much skiing for me now anyway with the young lads, haha. Have you family yourself out there?’
‘No.’ He wins that one anyway. Can’t compete with having a family.
‘Ah shur – plenty of time, I suppose.’ Well, at least I’m married and have a family and built a house and stayed around and am putting in the hard yards in the community and doing all the dull stuff while you’re stuck out there with a load of humourless Yanks going skiing with some f*cker who won’t know your name next year when he goes off to work with some other shower that make some other internet thing. And you’ll be fifty, sitting at some barbecue going on about sidewalks and the trunk of your car and you’ll be just as boring as me, but with a better tan.
‘I suppose so.’ C’mon away out so and we’ll have the craic. I’ll show you all around Castro on Pride weekend and you’ll never have seen anything like it in your life.
‘Good man.’ Probably gay himself, I’d say. They all are out in San Francisco. I wonder what it’s like, though?
‘And how are things here?’ Go on, tell me how bad it is. It keeps me going, reading all the comments on the Indo website with people moaning.
‘Goin’ well, actually.’ I’m not going to give HIM the satisfaction of telling him anything’s wrong anyway.
‘So that’s the way now.’ I’d love to spend six months at home.
‘That’s the way.’ I’d love to spend six months out there.
‘OBVIOUSLY THERE WILL be some teething difficulties but you’ll start to see huge efficiencies once the system has bedded down. It will optimize existing processes,’ they say. ‘There will be increasing convenience for customers and exciting new opportunities will come on stream.’ The modern world brings with it the prospect of progress. We are promised a brave new world, or a safer, more secure world. But progress also brings with it a load of oul shite.
Humans are hard work at the best of times, but you’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Take the stealthy takeover of self-service. We didn’t notice it at first. Filling our own petrol tanks? Sure, why not. Getting our own sausages – and sometimes making our own pancakes – at the hotel breakfast bar? It’s just as handy. The ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ woman? Oh, she’d drive you mad but she’s only doing her job, I spose. Gradually though, the power of self has spread and now it’s in the bank.
There are two layers of security in the average branch. First of all you have to get through their airlock security system and wait for the green light.
The other layer is human. As you walk in, you have to try to sidestep friendly bank staff as they gently remind you of your capabilities. ‘Do you want to save time and use the lodgement machine?’ is their opening gambit, much as a Jehovah’s Witness might ask, ‘Would you like to hear about how you can be saved by Jesus Christ?’ If you falter at all they will gently guide you to a flashing screen. ‘It’s great if you want to skip the queue,’ they say. You feel like screaming, ‘THERE WOULDN’T BE A QUEUE IF YOU WENT BEHIND THE COUNTER’ or ‘I JUST WANT THE WARM EMBRACE OF A HUMAN VOICE AND TO FEEL LIKE THEY NEED THE UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION I HAVE ON WHAT THE WEATHER IS LIKE OUT THERE NOW.’