Story Bud? Funding the feature film

Remember Story Bud?, the video of Irish slang and colloquialisms I shared here in February? Director Jenny Keogh has filmed a second clip, How’s About Ye?, in the same style, and it’s great fun altogether.

There are on-screen glosses for the phrases, but because the delivery and editing are rapid-fire – and some of the accents are strong – I’ve added Jenny’s transcript below, with a few tweaks.

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In related news, Jenny is working on a feature-length film comprising more of these videos along with expert interviews and other footage. She’s holding “Phrase Donor Clinics” around Ireland to collect phrases from the public to use in the film.

Jenny is crowdfunding this on Fund it, an Irish Kickstarter-type website, so if you’d like to support this very worthy project, you can. There’s two weeks left to contribute; pledges from €15 up earn a reward, and if funding falls short, you won’t be charged. You can find out more at JennyKeogh.com and on the Story Bud? Facebook page.

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Living under a hen

Alice Taylor’s Quench the Lamp is a warm and funny memoir of her childhood in rural Cork in the 1940s, full of anecdotes and observations on farm activities, family dramas, eccentric neighbours, and Irish life before and after electrification.

A chapter on thrift and the “art of making do” shows how objects’ versatility was engineered and enhanced. Pot lids warmed beds, goose wings dusted cobwebs, turf dust was deployed when the cat did “what he must where he shouldn’t”. Bags and boxes were strategically repurposed once emptied of their original cargo.

Newspaper served a multitude of roles, some of them still current even in urban lifestyles:

Our newspaper, the Cork Examiner, was a multi-purpose item. It cleaned and polished windows and it covered bare timber floors before the first lino or tarpaulin went down, thus providing underlay and insulation. Placed in layers on top of wire bed-springs, it eased the wear on the horsehair mattress; cut into the right shape, it became insoles in heavy leather boots and shoes and, later, in wellingtons when they became part of our lives. Even though it could never be described as baby soft, it was the forerunner of the multi-million-pound industry that subsequently provided soft solutions in the toilet-paper business. Rolled into balls it was a firelight, its effectiveness improved by a sprinkling of paraffin oil. Ned [a local shop owner] shaped it into funnels and filled it with sweets to make a tóimhsín, as he called it. At home it lined drawers and was considered mothproof and, when nothing else was available, it was used as a dustpan. One of our more industrious neighbours regularly covered her potato stalks with newspaper at night and this protected them from frost.

Taylor says those who excelled in the frugal art ran the risk of being considered thrifty to a fault – it would be said of them that they “could live under a hen”. Or you might say someone “could live in your ear and rent out the other one without you knowing it”.

A tóimhsín or tomhaisín /’t̪oːʃiːn/, by the way, is Irish for a small measure or amount, or in this case a cone-shaped paper bag or poke, often used for holding sweets. It comes from tomhais “measure, weigh”, and is sometimes anglicised as tosheen, to-sheen, or toisheen.

Dialect query: The head of/on/to him

Regular commenter John Cowan has a question on non-standard phrases, and hopes Sentence first readers can shed some light on it:

I’d like some information from native speakers of Hiberno-English, the English variety spoken in Ireland (all counties). I figure this is a good community to ask.

Consider these three kinds of possessives applied to body parts. None of them are part of Standard English, but they are all used in other languages and possibly in spoken Hiberno-English too.

Story Bud? A video of Dublin phrases, with notes

Story Bud? is a fun video by Jenny Keogh that’s doing the rounds. It’s a rapid-fire two-minute clip of Dublin slang and colloquial expressions. They’re not all peculiar to Dublin – some are heard around Ireland or in other countries – but they all have currency in Irish English speech and offer a fine flavour of Dublin’s vernacular.

Certain lines may be hard to decipher, especially for non-Irish people. The accents are quite strong, and some of the expressions are strange if you haven’t heard them before. So I’ve typed them out below, with notes, and numbered them for ease of reference. (The video itself also supplies occasional glosses.)

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Irish Folk Furniture, a stop-motion documentary

Irish Folk Furniture is a stop-motion documentary, 8½ minutes long, that won an award for animation at the Sundance Film Festival last month. Director Tony Donoghue thought it might be too specialist to appeal widely, but it has charmed its way around the festival circuit. I recommend it warmly.

The film celebrates the tradition and use of farmhouse furniture in Ireland, with 16 items restored to a functional state. This is furniture not usually seen as beautiful – or starring in a film – but whose appeal lies in its very ordinariness and utility, and in the history it amasses over generations of use.

It’s a quiet gem in both form and content: as if Jan Švankmajer had rambled down a boreen in Tipperary. Dressers and flour bins wheel around the countryside while their owners chat away. The film is gently funny, beautifully shot, and features some lovely rural Irish accents and syntax, e.g. done as preterite in “we done a good bit on ’em”.

I wanted to link to the original on Donoghue’s YouTube page, but that video has since been set to private, so here it is from another page:

Edit: I’ve removed the video after seeing a comment on YouTube from Tony Donoghue saying his film was only meant to be online for the two weeks of Sundance, and that its continued online presence may undermine its film festival run.

If it reappears legitimately, I’ll reinstate it here.

Making a hames of it

The word hame is usually found in the plural: hames are two curved wooden or metal pieces forming part of the collar of a draught animal’s harness; they fit around the neck and the traces are fastened to them. (A draught/draft animal is one used for muscular work, typically pulling – i.e., drawing – a cart, plough, or other heavy load.)

In Ireland, though, hames has been repurposed in the informal idiom make a hames of, meaning make a mess or a hash of. It implies the mess has resulted from carelessness, clumsiness, or ineptitude: a sports player who misses an easy opportunity, or a baker who forgets the leavening agent, can be said to have made a hames of it.

Hames is sometimes preceded by a modifying or intensifying term: you could make a right hames, a fierce hames, an almighty hames, an awful hames, or a complete and total hames of a task. Browsing Google Books we find a variety of things being made a hames of: jobs, plays, heists, documents, Bibles, sums, relationships, Socialism:

This was a good start: my first salaried job and I was making a hames of it. (Robert E. Tangney, Other Days Around Me)

Why should a carefully-prepared document be made a hames of by a typographically illiterate user who has set to display as 44pt Punk Bold in diagonal purple and green stripes? (TEX Users Group, Vol. 16, 1995)

Often it’s just it that appears at the end of the phrase, in which case the expression refers to something made obvious by the context:

“Expressed at its simplest, it’s ‘You can’t let the Irish run the country, sure they’d make a hames of it.’” (David McKittrick, Endgame: The search for peace in Northern Ireland)

“How did I make a hames of your play?” asked F. J. “You made a hames of it at that particular line when Donal says… (Garry O’Connor, Sean O’Casey: A Life)

Make a hames of is very much an Irish expression. Its meagre results in Google’s vast books corpus, and its total absence from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (and the Historical one), testify to the idiom’s limited province. But it’s in active use here. I heard it regularly growing up, and still do occasionally. I like how it sounds.

A search on the Irish Times website reveals several recent instances of its use from politicians, spokepersons, and journalists themselves, including the memorable line: “But why is the young Irish male making such a hames of the hip-hop hug?” It even shows up in headlines. More informal examples may be found in the Boards.ie forums.

The OED says hame is from Middle Dutch (Dutch haam) corresponding to Middle High German ham(e) = fishing rod, of unknown origin. Why it was incorporated into the phrase make of hames of is uncertain: maybe because it’s difficult to put hames on the right way. Michael Quinion says his “carriage-driving consultant tells me it’s all too easy to put the hames on a horse the wrong way up, thus making a complete mess of things”. Terence Dolan tentatively supports this etymology.

Chambers Slang Dictionary mentions hame and haym as variants of haim (etymology unknown), jazz lingo for “a job other than in the music business; . . . a job, usually tedious or unpleasant”, but there’s no obvious connection with the hames discussed above. I could try to forge one speculatively, but I would probably make a hames of it.

[more posts on Hiberno-English]

The meanings and origins of ‘feck’

Look away now if curse words bother you.

Feck is a popular minced oath in Ireland, occupying ground between the ultra-mild expletive flip and the often taboo (but also popular) fuck. It’s strongly associated with Irish speech, and serves a broad range of linguistic purposes that I’ll address briefly in this post.

The most familiar modern use of feck is as a euphemistic substitute for fuck, as in the phrases Feck!, Feck off!, feck it, feck-all, fecker, feck(ed) up, fair fecks (kudos), (for) feck(‘s) sake, fecked (exhausted, ruined, in a bad situation), and the intensifier feckin’ or fecking, which often collocates with hell, eejit, gobshite or some such insult.

Here are a few literary examples: