Mar dhea, moryah — a sceptical Irish interjection

The Irish phrase mar dhea /mɑr’jæ/, /mɑrə’jæ/ “mor ya” is characteristic of Irish English speech. It’s a sceptical interjection used to cast doubt, dissent or derision (or all three) on whatever phrase or clause precedes it. Mar dhea literally means as were it, i.e., as if it were so.*

Sometimes mar dhea is translated as forsooth, but I’m not sure this is helpful. Better to consider it an ironic insertion similar to As if!, Yeah right!, or a sarcastic indeed or supposedly. Bernard Share, in Slanguage, describes it as an “expression of sardonic disbelief or dissent”, while P. W. Joyce says it’s:

a derisive expression of dissent to drive home the untruthfulness of some assertion or supposition or pretence, something like the English ‘forsooth’, but infinitely stronger [English As We Speak It In Ireland]

Mar dhea has been anglicised in many ways, for example moryah, mor-yah, maryah, mara-ya, maryeah, mauryah, maureeyah, muryaa, moy-ah, and moya. It’s a testament to its popularity in Hiberno-English, the diversity of Irish pronunciation, and the difficulty of finding precise orthographic correspondence between the two tongues.

Come here till I tell you about ‘till’ in Ireland

Till (= until) has an extra sense in Irish English that means something like “in order that” or “so that [someone] can…”. A doting relative, upon meeting you after a long absence, might say “Come here till I see you”, which means “Come closer so that I can look at you properly”.

Raymond Hickey, in his essay Southern Irish English, gives the example “Come here till I tell you.” This common expression can invite a listener who is within earshot to move physically closer, but it doesn’t always: it can also serve simply to announce an item of discourse, to prepare an audience’s ears for something of interest or significance, e.g.:

Come here till I tell you what happened this morning.

Used this way, Come here till I tell you is like a longer version of Old English Hwæt! (Hark!, Lo!, Listen!, etc.; literally What!), signalling the beginning of a story, albeit usually shorter than Beowulf. Some speakers run “Come here till” together so it sounds like “C’meertle”.

T. P. Dolan has a nice entry in his Dictionary of Hiberno-English, in which he says till reflects the wider meaning of go /gʌ/ — the corresponding conjunction in Irish — and the idiom behaves “as if it were an adverbial clause of purpose”.

You can see how it works in the literary examples he provides:

Where is he till I murder him? (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Come here till I embrace you. (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

Tell me who’s to blame will yeh til I tear his friggin’ head off. (Billy Roche, A Handful of Stars)

Come here till I comb your hair. (Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes)

And a few more from Google Books:

“You killed my brother,” said the giant; “come here, till I make a garter of your body.” (J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands)

“Och, captain, avick! och! och! come here till I eat you!” And she flung her arm round Robinson’s neck, and bestowed a little furious kiss on him. (Charles Reade, It Is Never Too Late to Mend)

Give me yer blissin’ till I go away to push me fortune. (Seumas MacManus, ‘Twas in Dhroll Donegal)

The MacManus line is one of several illustrative examples included in Michael Montgomery’s From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English.

P. W. Joyce reported in 1910 that this till (“in order that”) was used in many parts of Ireland. Certainly it was familiar to me growing up in the west, and I still hear and use it from time to time.

Updates:

Elizabeth McGuane loves the turn of phrase Come here till I tell you, and adds the related Come here to me and Come here to me now till I tell you. Ronan Delaney believes it’s “all down to that full Irish construction Gabh i leigth anseo go… or roughly Goile’nseo go…”

John Byrne says C’mere till I tell you a question is an “old Limerickism”, while Sally Tipper says the post got her thinking about the “northern English use of while to mean till“, as in “I’ll not be back while late”; she can’t vouch for all contexts, so maybe a native can shed light.

‘Ledgebag’ is totes amaze

‘Are you leaving your curlers in, Dot, till it starts?’ Eithne Duggan asked her friend.
‘Oh def.,’ Doris O’Beirne said. She wore an assortment of curlers — white pipe-cleaners, metal clips, and pink, plastic rollers. Eithne had just taken hers out and her hair, dyed blonde, stood out, all frizzed and alarming. She reminded Mary of a moulting hen about to attempt flight.

This passage appears in Edna O’Brien’s Irish Revel, from her short story collection The Love Object (1968). I like her list of curlers and the unsparing description of Eithne’s hair, but I’m quoting it here because it contains a curious abbreviation — def. for definitely — that I don’t remember seeing in written dialogue before.

Nowadays, definitely is often abbreviated as defo by teens and 20-/30-somethings. My younger sister has introduced me to several novel clippings she and her peers use, and which are an ongoing source of familial amusement and interest. Some of what follows I owe to her; others I came across elsewhere. Some are old, some new.

Besides defo there is hilar (hilarious), wev(s) (whatever), obvs and obvo (obviously), morto (mortifying), fabbo (fabulous), abso (absolutely), natch (naturally), /kaʒ/ (casual), dodge (dodgy), and tradge (tragic) — which through semantic inflation can be used to refer to pretty much anything mildly regrettable. The exaggeration is often deliberate, and lends the utterance an ironic or tongue-in-cheek quality.

What do you wonder at, asthore?

Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o’er
Hill and vale puts out the day—
What do you wonder at, asthore,
What’s away in yonder grey?

Dark the eyes that linger long—
Dream-fed heart, awake, come in,
Warm the hearth and gay the song:
Love with tender words would win.

Fades the eve in dreamy fire,
But the heart of night is lit:
Ancient beauty, old desire,
By the cabin doorway flit.

from Twilight by the Cabin by George William Russell, aka Æ.

You might have wondered at the word asthore. It’s an Irish English term of endearment, an anglicised form of the Irish a stór /ə’st̪oːr/, meaning “my dear” or “my darling” – literally “treasure”, with the Irish vocative particle a.

I love the sound and appearance of a stór. Google Books has examples of it in literary use, but asthore appears to be the more common form. I’ve also come across m’asthore, a mixed-tongue contraction of mo stór, “my treasure”.

What do you wonder at, a stór?

And did you notice how the verses above look like a face in profile, with a strong nose, a weak chin, and the broad brim of a hat?

[P.S. I shared the first verse on Twitter and then on Google+, which I recently joined. Because I haven’t yet decided how best to balance these accounts, I’m sharing it here too.]

Genderally speaking

August 2011 was “gender English” month at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, and a few of my recent posts there focus on this aspect of the language.

In “Problems with pronouns”, I address the issue of gender-neutral third person singular personal pronouns (I’m a singular-they man, myself), and wonder about the effectiveness of an experiment in Egalia, a pre-school in Sweden which forsakes gendered pronouns altogether:

Plural pronouns (they, them, their, themselves) have been used for centuries to refer to singular antecedents, not only in informal speech but in classic literature. This raises the hackles of sticklers, though, who protest that it contravenes grammatical concord. The influence of Google+ should give singular they a boost, but Facebook ran into difficulty here. Themself – which centuries ago was used where we now use themselves – is occasionally resorted to, but it is a non-standard form. [more]

My next post, “Getting cute about gender”, looks at the etymology and historical and contemporary senses of cute, a word whose usage is strongly skewed by gender. It also has a usage peculiar to Ireland:

Irish English has a version of this lesser sense of cute that is typically heard in the colloquialism “cute hoor”. Hoor in this case derives from whore but doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with sex; rather, it’s a general term of abuse applied usually to males, often corrupt ones. A cute hoor is someone cunning and devious. It’s commonly heard in political contexts, and has given rise to the noun phrase “cute hoorism”:

This is the kind of political cute hoorism that has the economy where it is today. (Irish Times, 30 June 2011)

Like many Irish insults, hoor is sometimes used with affection, even respect. It can also indicate strong or unhealthy fondness (“He’s an awful hoor for the horses/drink”). [more]

In “Finding the riot words”, I write about some of the linguistic aspects of the recent riots in England, for example the debate over what to call the people who were rioting:

The BBC was criticised for continuing to use the word protesters for a few days after the term had become inappropriate. The broadcaster later admitted it had made a mistake; Fran Unsworth, BBC News head of newsgathering, added:

We try not to be too prescriptive, but yes we have said actually that they’re not protesters they’re clearly rioters and looters. They are more descriptive terms and we should try and be as accurately descriptive as we can be.

Though the BBC went out of its way to avoid terms that could be considered judgemental, other media outlets and commentators were less cautious. All sorts of words were used to refer to the rioters – looters, thieves, criminals, hooligans, thugs, yobs, idiots, cretins, scum, terrorists, feral underclass. A few of these are, to use Unsworth’s phrase, accurately descriptive; others are loaded with prejudice or carry a nasty subtext. [more]

Back to gender: “Fighting fire with ‘firefighter’” is about how some words become outdated for political reasons, and what dictionaries do as meanings “shift and drift and settle anew”:

Dictionaries record how language is used, so they can’t simply ignore sexist and discriminatory usages – or new terms that supersede them – no matter how objectionable some people might find them. But by tagging words and adding usage notes, dictionaries can point out controversies, indicate that a word is non-standard or politically incorrect, and trust to readers’ judgement. . . .

One of the arguments against gender-biased terms like fireman and chairman is that they suggest that these roles – and the power and bravery and other virtues associated with them – are the exclusive or particular preserve of men. Sexist terminology often takes the male as norm, the female as derivation or deviation, and men have long considered themselves the quintessential type: Joe Public as “modern man”, putting in man-hours with his manpower.

This led to a good discussion in the comments about (among other things) gender-neutral words for postman. There’s more terminology here – and difficulty – than I first supposed!

My latest post is “Use ‘bloody’? Not Pygmalion likely!” This picks up on a piece the Virtual Linguist wrote about the controversial language in Shaw’s famous play:

Eliza’s line (“Walk! Not bloody likely.”) caused a scandal, and the word Pygmalion was used for decades afterwards as a jocular substitute expletive, as in the title of this post.

Bloody retains a peculiar power to bother people. Just a few years ago, its use in a tourism campaign in Australia caused a considerable fuss. Michael Quinion reports on his World Wide Words website that the Australian prime minister couldn’t bring himself to speak the offending line (“So where the bloody hell are you?”) on radio, but that the tourism minister had a markedly different attitude: “It’s the great Australian adjective. We all use it, it’s part of our language.” [more]

That’s it for this month. As always, comments in either location are very welcome. You can find the full archive of my Macmillan Dictionary Blog posts here, or by clicking the relevant link in the top right corner of this blog.

Dialects and dimpsy doddermen

Time for a recap of what I’ve been writing for Macmillan Dictionary Blog over the last few weeks. The theme for July was small talk, so a couple of my posts are on this subject. In “Small talk is no small matter” I make some general remarks about chit chat and its uses:

[S]mall talk serves a useful phatic function. It helps us tune in to other people’s accents and dialects, and to get used to their presence and the ways they express themselves. Before moving on to more contentious topics, such as finance or politics, we will have spent time sharing images and idioms and agreeing light-heartedly about various uncontroversial matters.

If the context is business, talking about travel and accommodation is apt to be both interesting and potentially useful to the parties involved. We can share tips, learn about one another’s tastes and habits, and bond over common frustrations and experiences. [more]

“A guddle through the dialectal wordbank” offers a quick rummage, or guddle, through some of the vocabulary I encountered in a project by the British Library that aims to collect regional English words. I also introduce deargadaol /,dʒærəgə’ði:l/, an Irish word that crossed over into my idiolect when I was a child. If you were wondering about the dimpsy doddermen in the post title, wonder no more:

I like dodderman for snail (Norfolk / Suffolk), dimpsy for twilight or just turning dark (Somerset), nesh, meaning weak, delicate, or susceptible to the cold (northern England), and guddle, meaning rummage about (Northumberland and parts of Scotland).

Many dialectal words are given to plants and animals, and they often have colourful histories. Bishybarnabee, a Norfolk word for a ladybird, might be a reference to the 16th-century bishop Edmond Bonner, aka “Bloody Bonner”, because the insect’s red and black colours were associated with the bishop’s clothes – or with his notorious deeds. [more]

Back to small talk, with an Irish flavour: in “Top of the morning to yourself” I examine a well-known Irish greeting that no one in Ireland seems to use anymore except in jest or irony. I also write briefly about Irish people’s fondness for reflexive pronouns:

“Top of the morning to you” would, like begorra(h) (a minced form of by God), be considered an Oirishism or a Paddyism, something popularly associated with stereotypes of Irishness but which is seldom or never used by Irish people themselves. As a recognisable caricature it has a certain commercial value, so it occasionally appears in marketing campaigns as a shorthand for Irishness and whatever else that’s intended to convey.

I mentioned the traditional response, “And the rest of the day to you”, but the last word would be just as likely to take the form yourself. Reflexive pronouns are very common in Irish English, often used for slight emphasis, e.g., “Good man/woman yourself”, “Ah, ‘tis yourself!” [more]

“Dialectal drift” was a brief response to a lively recent debate over Americanisms, which I hope to address at greater length in a future blog post. Copyediting newsletter was kind enough to call it “the voice of reason”, but as I said to someone elsewhere, these things are relative; I read a lot of unreason on the topic. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

Given that languages and dialects undergo constant change, and blend and blur into one another, the purist point of view seems misguided to me. . . . Catchphrases and idioms (often AmE) spread quickly, and grievances over new coinages and linguistic conventions are often knee-jerk objections that develop over time into pet hates. But some of these neologisms eventually become standard, widely used, and even loved. . . .

The history of English is a history of many languages and dialects mixing with one another. It’s what they do. I think linguistic diversity can and should be enjoyed and embraced. Instead of getting wound up about phrases we dislike, we can celebrate not only the great variation that exists but also the fact that so much mutual comprehensibility remains. [more]

Finally, there’s “Are you open to open kimonos?”, a short account of the phrase open kimono. A rather strange but memorable metaphor, it has recently become popular in business jargon:

Given the widespread taboo over exposed genitals and even underwear, open kimono – often seen in the verb phrase open the kimono – is a vividly effective metaphor for conveying transparency and frankness.

It’s semantically similar to an open book, which refers to people, but open kimono refers to a way of dealing with information, especially sensitive information like strategic plans or financial data. It is consistent with how Diane Nicholls describes honesty in her article about its metaphors: “honesty is bare and open”, something I discuss further in this post. [more]

You’ll find all my articles for Macmillan archived here, and my introductions to them are here. Comments in either location are welcome; I’m particularly interested in people’s favourite regional words and their feelings about small talk.

Ijit, idjit, eejit, idiot

After about 15 years of not reading Stephen King, I came across Dolores Claiborne in a second-hand bookshop and immediately bumped it to the upper reaches of my book mountain. I’ve long admired the film adaptation, so I was more than a little curious to visit the source.

Set on an island off the coast of Maine, New England, it’s a memorable story told very well as a continuous narrative in Dolores’s dialectal speech. It has one lexical feature that I want to mention here. No spoilers follow:

…the biggest ijit in the world coulda told he didn’t think I’d do any such thing once I finally understood what’d happened

I don’t remember seeing the word ijit in print before. Obviously it’s a regional form of idiot – like idjit, another variant – and means more or less the same thing (see eejit, below), but it’s interesting how its pronunciation /’ɪdʒət/ “idget” differs from the standard /’ɪdiət/ “iddy-uht”. I suppose this is related to the tendency for /dj/ to shift to /dʒ/ in words like due and during.

Ijit has only one hit in COCA; idjit has three, including the amusing line “an optimist [...] is just a crossword puzzle way of saying idjit”. Browsing Google Books, though, I see that they’re not so rare, ijit occurring for instance in a story by Jacques Futrelle, who lived not far from Maine in Scituate, Massachusetts.

I expect they occur here and there around the English-speaking world. Wordnik aggregates several colloquial examples of both forms. Rooting around some more, I see that ijit is also an old African American word, mentioned in Hubert Anthony Shands’s Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi (1893):

Eejit is the Irish English equivalent, and is common in fictional and vernacular dialogue. It doesn’t connote mental retardation – idiot can – instead signalling foolish behaviour, be it chronic or occasional. Eejit is softer than idiot, and is not generally used hurtfully but to gently criticise someone the speaker knows and may well hold in affection. I imagine this is also true of ijit and idjit, but I’m open to correction.

T. P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers a few literary examples of eejit and a note on pronunciation: that it approximates the Irish rendering of d and i. Take for example the Irish words Dia (God) /’dʲi:æ/ and idir (between) /’ɪdʲər/. [Edit: See the comments for more on this.]

“You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,” his old father used to say snappishly. (William Trevor, Fools of Fortune)

Common modifiers of eejit include big, awful, feckin’, fuckin’, and oul’ (also ould, aul’, auld). Its jocular flavour made it a frequent favourite in the TV comedy Father Ted, and might help explain why the word was found to be not unparliamentary when it was used in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Irish English as Represented in Film by Shane Walshe presents some uses of the word in films, but you’ll have to turn your head sideways to read them. Like an eejit.