P. W. Joyce

“ Those that I give here in collected form were taken from the living lips of the people during the last thirty or forty years.
'Be first in a wood and last in a bog.' If two persons are making their way, one behind the other, through a wood, the hinder man gets slashed in the face by the springy boughs pushed aside by the first: if through a bog, the man behind can always avoid the dangerous holes by seeing the first sink into them. This proverb preserves the memory of a time when there were more woods and bogs than there are now: it is translated from Irish. ”

“ When a man declines to talk with or discuss matters with another, he says 'I owe you no discourse'—used in a more or less offensive sense—and heard all through Ireland.
When a person shows himself very cute and clever another says to him 'Who let you out?'—an ironical expression of fun: as much as to say that he must have been confined in an asylum as a confirmed fool. (Moran: Carlow.)
When a person for any reason feels elated, he says 'I wouldn't call the king my uncle.' ('Knocknagow'; but heard everywhere in Ireland.) ”

“ Putting on the big pot means empty boasting and big talk. Like a woman who claps a large pot of water on the fire to boil a weeny little bit of meat—which she keeps out of sight—pretending she has launa-vaula, lashings and leavings, full and plenty. ”

“ And so the native Irish people learned to speak Elizabethan English—the very language used by Shakespeare; and in a very considerable degree the old Gaelic people and those of English descent retain it to this day. For our people are very conservative in retaining old customs and forms of speech. Many words accordingly that are discarded as old-fashioned—or dead and gone—in England, are still flourishing—alive and well—in Ireland. ”

“ Those who wish to avoid uttering the plain straight name 'devil' often call him 'the Old Boy,' or 'Old Nick.'
In some of the stories relating to the devil he is represented as a great simpleton and easily imposed upon: in others as clever at everything. In many he gets full credit for his badness, and all his attributes and all his actions are just the reverse of the good agencies of the world; so that his attempts at evil often tend for good, while anything he does for good—or pretending to be for good—turns to evil. ”

“ Our use of shall and will prevails also in Scotland, where the English change of custom has not obtained any more than it has in Ireland. The Scotch in fact are quite as bad (or as good) in this respect as we are. Like many another Irish idiom this is also found in American society chiefly through the influence of the Irish. In many parts of Ireland they are shy of using shall at all: I know this to be the case in Munster; and a correspondent informs me that shall is hardly ever heard in Derry. ”

“ The great ambition of the pooka horse is to get some unfortunate wight on his back; and then he gallops furiously through bogs, marshes, and woods, over rocks, glens, and precipices; till at last when the poor wretch on his back is nearly dead with terror and fatigue, the pooka pitches him into some quagmire or pool or briar-brake, leaving him to extricate himself as best he can. But the goblin does not do worse: he does not kill people. Irish púca. Shakespeare has immortalised him as Puck, the goblin of 'A Midsummer-Night's Dream.'
Pookapyle, also called Pookaun ”

“ Sometimes the devil is taken as the type of excellence or of great proficiency in anything, or of great excess, so that you often hear 'That fellow is as old as the devil,' 'That beefsteak is as tough as the devil,' 'He beats the devil for roguery,' 'My landlord is civil, but dear as the divil.' (Swift: who wrote this with a pen dipped in Irish ink.)
A poor wretch or a fellow always in debt and difficulty, and consequently shabby, is a 'poor devil' ”

“ In Ireland a ditch is a raised fence or earthen wall or mound, and a dyke (or sheuch as they call it in Donegal and elsewhere in Ulster) is a deep cutting, commonly filled with water. In England both words mean exactly the reverse. Hence 'hurlers on the ditch,' or 'the best hurlers are on the ditch' (where speakers of pure English would use 'fence') said in derision of persons who are mere idle spectators sitting up on high watching the game—whatever it may be—and boasting how they would do the devil an' all if they were only playing. ”

“ But in many other ways we show our tendency to this wordy overflow—still deriving our mannerism from the Irish language—that is to say, from modern and middle Irish. For in very old Irish—of the tenth, eleventh, and earlier centuries for instance, the tendency is the very reverse. In the specimens of this very old language that have come down to us, the words and phrases are so closely packed, that it is impossible to translate them either into English or Latin by an equal number of words. ”

“ Half a dozen young men with spades and shovels built up a rude cabin in a few hours, which served the purpose of a schoolhouse: and from the common plan of erecting these in the shelter of hedges, walls, and groves, the schools came to be known as 'Hedge Schools.' These hedge schools held on for generations, and kept alive the lamp of learning, which burned on—but in a flickering ineffective sort of way—'burned through long ages of darkness and storm'—till at last the restrictions were removed, and Catholics were permitted to have schools of their own openly and without let or hindrance. ”

“ Squireen; an Irish gentleman in a small way who apes the manners, the authoritative tone, and the aristocratic bearing of the large landed proprietors. Sometimes you can hardly distinguish a squireen from a half-sir or from a shoneen. Sometimes the squireen was the son of the old squire: a worthless young fellow, who loafed about doing nothing, instead of earning an honest livelihood: but he was too grand for that. The word is a diminutive of squire, applied here in contempt, like many other diminutives. ”

“ I suppose he's living on the fat of his guts': meaning he is living on whatever he has saved. But it is sometimes used in the direct sense. Poor old Hill, while his shop prospered, had an immense paunch, but he became poor and had to live on poor food and little of it, so that the belly got flat; and the people used to say—he's living now on the fat of his guts, poor old fellow.
Tom Hogan is managing his farm in a way likely to bring him to poverty, and Phil Lahy says to him—'Tom, you'll scratch a beggarman's back yet': meaning that Tom will himself be the beggarman. ”

“ One Sunday during the South African war, Mass was celebrated as usual in the temporary chapel, which, after the rough and ready way of the camp, served for both Catholics and Protestants: Mass first; Protestant Service after. On this occasion an Irish officer, a splendid specimen of a man, tall, straight, and athletic—a man born to command, and well known as a strict and devoted Catholic—was serving Mass—aiding and giving the responses to the priest. The congregation was of course of mixed nationalities—English, Irish, and Scotch, and the chapel was filled. ”

“ Even some of the best men will occasionally, in an unguarded moment or in a hasty flash of anger, give way to the swearing instinct. Father John Burke of Kilfinane—I remember him well—a tall stern-looking man with heavy brows, but really gentle and tender-hearted—held a station at the house of our neighbour Tom Coffey, a truly upright and pious man. All had gone to confession and Holy Communion, and the station was over. ”

“ We in Ireland are much inclined to redundancy in our speech. It is quite observable—especially to an outsider—that even in our ordinary conversation and in answering simple questions we use more words than we need. We hardly ever confine ourselves to the simple English yes or no; we always answer by a statement. ”

“ Tom Boyle had a more ambitious plan:—he got a tinker to make a hollow figure of tin, something like the figure of his wife, who was a little woman, which Tom dressed up in his wife's clothes and placed on the pillion behind him on the horse—filled with pottheen: for in those times it was a common custom for the wife to ride behind her husband. At last a sharp-eyed policeman, seeing the man's affectionate attention so often repeated, kept on the watch, and satisfied himself at last that Tom had a tin wife. ”

“ When it is a matter of indifference which of two things to choose, we usually say 'It is equal to me' (or 'all one to me') , which is just a translation of is cuma liom (best rendered by 'I don't care') . Both Irish and English expressions are very common in the respective languages. Lowry Looby says:—'It is equal to me whether I walk ten or twenty miles.' (Gerald Griffin.)
'I am a bold bachelor, airy and free,
Both cities and counties are equal to me.'
(Old Song.) ”

“ A thoothach or thoohagh is an ignorant unmannerly clownish fellow: and hóchan means much the same thing, except that it is rather lower in the sense of ignorance or uncouthness. Passing through the Liberties of Dublin I once heard a woman—evidently from Limerick—call a man a dirty hóchan. Both words are derived from tuath [thooa] , a layman, as distinguished from a cleric or a man of learning. The Irish form of the first is tuathtach: of the second thuathcháin (vocative) . ”

“ The adoption of Irish words and phrases into English nowadays is in great measure due to the influence of Irishmen resident in England, who write a large proportion—indeed I think the largest proportion—of the articles in English periodicals of every kind. Other Irish words such as shamrock, whiskey, bother, blarney, are now to be found in every English Dictionary. Smithereens too (broken bits after a smash) is a grand word, and is gaining ground every day. ”

“ Standing black often heard.
'He's not all there,' i.e. he is a little daft, a little cracked, weak-minded, foolish, has a slight touch of insanity: 'there's a slate off,' 'he has a bee in his bonnet' (Scotch) : 'he wants a square' (this last Old English) .
A man gets into an angry fit and you take no trouble to pacify him:—'Let him cool in the skin he heated in.' (Moran: Carlow.)
A person asks me for money: I give him all I have, which is less than he asked for:—'That is all [the corn] there's threshed.' (Moran: Carlow.) ”

“ Hence in Irish 'east' is 'front'; 'west' is 'behind' or 'back'; north is 'left hand'; and south is 'right hand.' The people sometimes import these terms into English. 'Where is the tooth?' says the dentist. 'Just here sir, in the west of my jaw,' replies the patient—meaning at the back of the jaw.
Tailors were made the butt of much good-natured harmless raillery, often founded on the well-known fact that a tailor is the ninth part of a man. If a person leaves little after a meal, or little material after any work—that is 'tailor's leavings' ”

“ The memory of this very old custom lives in a word still very common in the South of Ireland—boolimskee, Irish buailim-sciath, 'I strike the shield,' applied to a man much given to fighting, a quarrelsome fellow, a swaggering bully—a swash-buckler. ”

“ We in Ireland are rather prone to exaggeration, perhaps more so than the average run of peoples. Very often the expressions are jocose, or the person is fully conscious of the exaggeration; but in numerous cases there is no joke at all: but downright seriousness: all which will be seen in the following examples.
A common saying about a person of persuasive tongue or with a beautiful voice in singing:—'He would coax the birds off the bushes.' This is borrowed from the Irish. ”

“ The general run of our people do not swear much; and those that do commonly limit themselves to the name of the devil either straight out or in some of its various disguised forms, or to some harmless imitation of a curse. You do indeed come across persons who go higher, but they are rare. ”

“ Our Irish-English expression 'to come round a person' means to induce or circumvent him by coaxing cuteness and wheedling: 'He came round me by his sleudering to lend him half a crown, fool that I was': 'My grandchildren came round me to give them money for sweets.' This expression is borrowed from Irish:—'When the Milesians reached Erin tanic a ngáes timchioll Tuathi De Danand, 'their cuteness circumvented (lit. 'came round') the Dedannans.' (Opening sentence in Mesca Ulad in Book of Leinster: Hennessy.) ”

“ A person readily finds a lost article when it is missed, and is suspected to have hidden it himself:—'What the Pooka writes he can read.' (Munster.)
A man is making no improvement in his character or circumstances but rather the reverse as he advances in life:—'A year older and a year worse.'
'A shut mouth catches no flies.' Much the same as the English 'Speech is silvern, silence is golden.'
To the same effect is 'Hear and see and say nothing.'
A fool and his money are easily parted.
Oh I see you expect that Jack (a false friend) will stand at your back. ”

“ More than a thousand years ago distance was often vaguely measured in Ireland by sound. A man felling a tree was 'bound by the Brehon Law {181}to give warning as far as his voice could reach,' so as to obviate danger to cattle or people. We find a like measure used in Donegal to this day:— [The Dublin house where you'll get the book to buy is on the Quays] 'about a mountain man's call below the Four Courts.' (Seumas MacManus.) The crow of a cock and the sound of a bell (i.e. the small hand-bell then used) as measures of distances are very often met with in ancient Irish writings. ”

“ But our people in Ireland, retaining the old English custom, have a leaning towards the strong inflection, and not only use many of the old-fashioned English strong past tenses, but often form strong ones in their own way:—We use slep and crep, old English; and we coin others. ”

“ Once during a high wind the ship's captain neatly distinguished it when a frightened lady asked him:—'Is there any fear, sir?' 'There's plenty of fear, madam, but no danger.'
Feck or fack; a spade. From the very old Irish word, fec, same sound and meaning.
Fellestrum, the flagger (marsh plant) . Irish felestrom. (South.)
Fetch; what the English call a double, a preternatural apparition of a living person, seen usually by some relative or friend. If seen in the morning the person whose fetch it is will have a long and prosperous life: if in the evening the person will soon die. ”