‘Gates wide’ for ‘tome beours’ but be wary of the ‘óinseachs’

Country Living with Francis Farragher

One of the little regrets I have in life is that I didn’t make more of an effort to pick up the ‘cupla focal’ along the way in a manner that would allow me to have a basic conversation in our native tongue with other like-minded creatures.

One of the real disasters, I believe, for the Irish language back in the day, was that word ‘compulsory,’ which meant in my time at secondary school, if you didn’t pass Irish in the Leaving Cert, then you failed the whole exam.

That fear element about ‘having’ to learn Irish instilled in many of us a level of angst towards the language, instead of speaking it lovingly for the sheer joy of its rich vocabulary and its soft cadences.

What brought this to mind, is a conversation I had a few weeks ago about a man we used to meet on the bicycle on his way home from the pub way back the years, who fascinated us young lads with old yarns, many of which didn’t make any sense at all.

The man, who was from a nearby parish, was nicknamed ‘Seafóidean’ from the Irish word ‘seafóid’ which translates into nonsense and sometimes later on we’d be asked by our parents about: “What kind of ramás (doggerel or bad poetry) was yer man talking.”

Some expressions we take for granted can be a source of great curiosity and amusement to outsiders who haven’t heard them before. A while back, while in the company of an English man that I know quite well, on an outdoor sojourn, a particularly cold spit of rain descended arrived, and us natives all agreed that: “It was one dirty (durty) shower.”

Every so often, over the following hour or two, I could hear my English friend repeat the expression to himself – ‘a durty shower’ – with great mirth. Before the night was out, he was having great ‘craic’, in recalling our rain ‘lingo’ over a pint of Guinness or two.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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