Tag archives: Irish English
The wearin’ (and speakin’) o’ the green
Every month evokes a certain characteristic (January is cold, May brings flowers), but no month is more connected to a single color than March. The color, of course, is green. The onset of spring obviously plays into that, but as anyone in upstate New York could point out, the “spring greenness” of March is often [...]
Mochy, mizzly, or mothery? Ten regional words to describe the weather
The UK is often characterised (particularly in the US) as a damp and windy island with unusually changeable weather. The past week here has done little to dispel this impression, with flash floods in the North and muggy heat here in the South. Last week we asked our Twitter followers to describe the weather in [...]
Boomerang vocabulary: words that return to their origins
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” may have been good advice for Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it isn’t practical for a language. English is both an avid borrower (ballet, schmooze, wok) and a generous lender: consider German das Baby, French le week-end, and Japanese aisu kuriimu (‘ice cream’—try saying it out loud). Occasionally, [...]
Explore the language of Irish English, from ‘gobdaw’ to ‘hooley’
Tomorrow is St Patrick’s Day, which seems a perfect excuse to not only go out for a few beers and perhaps a couple of glasses of usquebaugh, but also to take a closer look at some Irish English words. However you choose to celebrate tomorrow, whether you’re planning to dance your socks off at a [...]
From ‘trousers’ to ‘Tories’: unexpected Irish words in English
Most English speakers would not be surprised to hear that words like banshee or shamrock have their origins in Irish, the Celtic language (also known as Gaelic) which is still spoken in the parts of Ireland known as the Gaeltacht. After all, most recognizable Irish words encountered in English have obvious connections to Ireland, like [...]
Lost in translation. . . so I was
We were lost – having turned off a brand new and completely empty motorway that cut across the lush green hills of the West coast of Ireland in a quest to visit my Irish mother’s third cousins twice removed. So we finally pulled up next to an old road sign, which confusingly said: ← Knockroe Knockroe [...]
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