Wasn’t It Herself Told Me?

Last month I mentioned my new essay on Irish English dialect, ‘Wasn’t It Herself Told Me?’, commissioned for the winter 2020 edition of the literary magazine The Stinging Fly.

If you didn’t get a copy of the Stinging Fly and want to read more of this material, you can now do so at the Irish Times website, which has published an abridged version of the essay. (I did the abridging myself, but some of the italics got lost in transit.)

Because the new Stinging Fly is a Galway special, the essay looks in particular at the Galway dialect, though this does not differ hugely from Irish English more broadly. The excerpt below elaborates on that point, using geography as an analogy:

Irish English dialect in The Stinging Fly

I have an essay on Irish English dialect in the latest Stinging Fly (winter 2020–21). The issue, just out, centres on Galway – the city, the county, the state of mind – to tie in with its status as European Capital of Culture this year.

The Stinging Fly is an Irish literary magazine on the go since 1997 and a book publisher since 2005. You can order its publications from the website or, depending on where you are, from your local bookshop.

My essay looks at Galway dialect, though its features are not that different (or different mainly in degree) from southern Irish English in general. The grammar, vocabulary, idiom, and phonology of Irish English are all considered from my vantage point on the Atlantic coast.

I also discuss dialect more broadly, because people new to language studies are often unsure just what it means – linguistically, politically, performatively.

cover art by Maeve Curtis; design by Catherine Gaffney

An excerpt:

Peeking, peeving, and grubbing around

I have three new posts up at my column for Macmillan Dictionary Blog:

Grubbing around for etymology digs into the origins and development of grub:

The noun grub has two common senses, but the connection between them is not widely known. It’s used informally to mean ‘food’, and it can also refer to ‘a young insect without wings or legs, like a small worm’ – in other words, a larva. The two grubs are related, etymologically, but not in the way you may be imagining – depending on your diet.

Piqued by peek and peak sorts out these often-confused homophones, offering mnemonics for each:

To peak (v.) means to reach the highest amount, level, or standard. Phrases that use peak include off-peak, peak oil, and peak time. This meaning explains why people sometimes write the eggcorn peak one’s interest instead of pique one’s interest – they may picture that interest peaking. To remember when to use the spelling peak, think of how the capital letter A is like a mountain. Picture the spelling as peAk, if that helps.

Policing grammar on the radio looks at an example of usage-peeving, wherein a journalist who spoke on Irish radio was criticised by one listener for her grammar:

According to Muphry’s Law (yes, that’s how it’s spelt), any complaint about grammar or usage will itself contain an error. Sure enough, the pedant misspells Moore’s name, and his punctuation is a mess. More importantly, he fails to understand that the rules of formal written English are not universal. Different norms apply when you’re having a conversation, for example, and speaking in your own dialect. So those ‘rules’ don’t even apply in most situations.

Grubbing around in the sand in County Mayo,

the Croagh Patrick peak in the background

Link love: language (75)

A fresh batch of linguistic items for your listening, viewing, and reading (lots of reading) pleasure. There are a few new language podcasts on the scene, but I’ll save those for a separate post.

 

On gibberish.

An auditory illusion.

The etymology of Triscuit.

On capitalizing Black and White.

Free ebook: Making Sense of “Bad English”.

A brief history of strange English street names.

The social value of linguistic creativity in a pandemic.

The Trouble with Harry’s grammar

Alfred Hitchcock’s comedy-thriller The Trouble with Harry (1955), amidst all its talk of murder and romance, has a fun little exchange of sociolinguistic interest between John Forsythe (‘Sam Marlowe’) and Edmund Gwenn (‘Capt. Albert Wiles’):

Geoff Lindsey: putting the fun in phonetics

I’ve been greatly enjoying videos by Geoff Lindsey, an accent coach from the UK who also gives courses at University College London. His YouTube channel has about 20 videos to date, mostly around 5 or 10 minutes long, on a wide range of topics to do with pronunciation and phonetics.

‘Most folks are amazed when they see the inner life of speech,’ Lindsey says in a fascinating, Stranger Things–themed primer on the human vocal organs that provides a snapshot of what happens anatomically when we speak:

Here he reveals what superhero names can tell us about stress patterns in English compounds – why, for example, we say Superman but Invisible Woman:

Book review: Cauld Blasts and Clishmaclavers, by Robin A. Crawford

My limited knowledge of Scots and Scottish English when I was young was based on caricatures in comics, particularly ‘Hot-Shot Hamish’. It was not until later that visits to Scotland, friendships with Scottish people, and books by the likes of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh gave me a proper flavour of the richness of Scots vocabulary and grammar.

Scots is a language with Germanic roots and a complicated political history. Linguistically it has been described as a continuum spanning Broad Scots and Standard Scottish English, with considerable variety in between. A common misconception is dispatched on the Spellin an Grammar page of Scots Wikipedia: ‘Scots isna juist Inglis written wi orra wirds an spellins. It haes its ain grammar an aw.’

It is wirds that are showcased in Cauld Blasts and Clishmaclavers, a new book by Robin A. Crawford, whose publisher, Elliott & Thompson, sent me a copy. The book is a marvellous compendium of a thousand Scottish words, from a’ (aa, aw) ‘all’ to yowe trummle ‘unseasonably cold weather in early summer’ – cold enough to make a yowe (ewe) trummle (tremble).