The sound of us: Colm O'Regan on the nature of Gallivanting with Words

In his latest book, comedian and writer Colm O’Regan chronicles the everyday poetry of Irish speech — and calls on us all to help preserve it, writes Colin Sheridan

Sat, 25 Oct, 2025 - 20:57

Colin Sheridan

Comedian, author, and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O’Regan’s latest project is a love letter to the way we speak.

Not just the grand turns of phrase, but the small, local miracles that vanish along with the last person we remember saying them.

There’s a moment, early in our chat, when the Cork man parks the jokes and talks like a man with serious work to do.

“We’ve been doing this for a hundred thousand years,” he says, meaning language, meaning the everyday miracle of saying and being understood.

“There’s so much locked away in how we speak — in accents, in the little words we don’t even notice we’re using.”

He says it softly, but Gallivanting with Words is, at heart, an act of salvage, of quiet rebellion.

The book is part almanac, part family album, part wink-and-elbow to the ribs of a nation: write it down before it’s gone.

He’s done versions of this before — the Irish Mammies phenomenon, those pithy 140-character gospels from early Twitter days, the fiction that grew out of a Farmers Journal column and a woman named Ann Devine who arrived on the page talking the way real people talk.

But this time the project is explicit.

“I wanted to fuse three things,” he says. “The nerdy fascination; the reverence — because this stuff matters; and the funny, because if it isn’t memorable it won’t stick.”

O’Regan’s reverence is mongrel and practical. He has gone down linguistic rabbit holes — “proper science”, he insists, with interviews, corpora, frequency analysis — and come back blinking with respect for anyone who maps how words come in and out of use.

He grins: “It gave me a new humility. People think linguists are making it up. They’re not. They’re listening.”

He’s listening too. To old Dublin via Give Up Yer Aul Sins, to the almost-vanished “right you be”, to country imperatives smuggled from Irish into Hiberno-English — “let you go to bed now” — phrases we inherit without noticing.

“That’s the thing,” he says. “A lot of it disappears when people die.”

O’Regan wants the living to fight that drift in small, domestic ways. He imagines the breakfast table as an archive.

“Your father’s favourite word isn’t in this book,” he writes, almost daring you to be offended. “Grand. Write it down.”

He has an image he leans on: the Norwegian seed vault; two mountain doors opening onto shelves of quiet rescue.

“Social media isn’t an archive,” he says. “It’s one power surge away from a blackout. A notebook is an archive.”

Colm O'Regan in the Museum of Literature Ireland, moli.ie. Picture: Nina Val, @nvksocial

SMALL COUNTRY, BIG MEMORY

If the book has an origin myth, it’s something like this: small country, big memory.

We are islanders, he argues, and islands are self-conscious by necessity. We know the shape of Idaho better than Idaho knows we exist.

We look at ourselves in public. We take the piss out of ourselves in private.

We overstate our understatement. We wear our dialect like the good trousers for visitors (“my father’s accent got stronger if the guests were from abroad,” he laughs).

I recall one of the first times a phrase wrong-footed me: a petrol-station in Donegal, 19 and green, the shop girl asking “are you getting?” — a plain local kindness that sounded, to a Mayo ear, like a riddle.

Later, social media would do a similar trick to the country: all those tiny, unprintable words suddenly typed and shared.

“Before, you’d never write ‘ara’,” he says. “Now you see ara, d’jever, yerra in comment threads. We’re transcribing our mouths.”

He loves this new evidence while worrying about its fragility. “It’s being recorded in an impermanent way,” he says. “So let’s help the proper archivists. Let’s write.”

O’Regan is careful with certainty. He likes origins but doesn’t fetishise them, and he wants the reader to push back when a tidy story feels too tidy.

Take “latchico” — is it a bull with one testicle, as John B Keane once quipped? A satchel-rooted insult? A mutated latch-key from the eviction years?

O’Regan will present the lot and mark his own theories as such, which is part good manners and part ethic: “History matters. Don’t make it up. Or if you must, label it nonsense.”

A BOOK OF LABELS

Gallivanting with Words is a book of labels and unlabelled jars.

You open one and there’s a case study of pure Hiberno-English, a road rage row in Irish where a van driver grammatically aspirates the c-word and hurls it across a windscreen like a hand-thrown brick.

You open another and there’s Shelta seeping into the city— sham, feen, pure — or the way Cork teenagers could once change your blood type with a single “like” at the end of a sentence.

He loves the original Hardy Bucks because they sound like the place, not the stereotype. He loves when a child on The Late Late Toy Show tells a yarn like an old storyteller and nobody smirks.

“We’ve never been more culturally aware, and never less inclined to hide it.”

And he admires the quiet graft behind the romance: Dúchas collectors with cold hands filling notebooks; Wexford’s Michael Fortune gathering snippets on a shoestring; the stubborn online librarians who open a free door to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) if you only ask.

He’s bashful about the research — “a lot of it is just knowing what to look for online” — but there’s hundreds of hours in this thing, even if he wears them lightly.

The lightness matters because O’Regan’s humour works like a public service. “Laughing is collective,” he says.

“You’re 20 times more likely to laugh with someone than on your own. If there’s a function to what I do — in comedy, in columns, in this book — it’s giving people that small, shared surprise: Someone else noticed that. In a polarised world, I can’t fix anything. But I can give people a few good minutes.”

He’s instinctively gentle — the opposite of the comic who needs a face to verbally smite. Even when the topic invites piety (climate change, say, in his earlier work) he looks for the common grin first.

It’s a craft choice and a temperament. “It’s exhausting to be negatively funny,” he says. “I’d be worried about people taking it up wrong. So I look for overlaps. The joy of language is an overlap.”

Sometimes the overlaps are glorious accidents. Hiberno-English and African American Vernacular English both love the word “shook” as a way of describing a state of mild discombobulation. We could spend another hour on this alone. That’s the beauty of this linguistic beast.

He loves how fiction shows its working too. When his first novel grew out of the Farmers Journal and became Ann Devine on the page, it was the dialogue he trusted.

“I love writing dialogue. The fun is in getting it right,” he says. “Irish audiences know when you’re faking it. It’s like that shot in The Snapper where Dessie drives to the Rotunda taking the worst possible route. Only a Dubliner notices, but once you notice you can’t unsee it. Same with the ear. You don’t have to capture every localism, but at least don’t put words in a mouth that your mouth would never use.”

A MOOD BOARD FOR THE COUNTRY

For all the scholarship and sentiment, Gallivanting with Words isn’t a dictionary and doesn’t want to be. It’s a mood board for a country’s sound.

It begins with a brisk gallop through our linguistic inheritance (no humble claim, he grins: “The utter hubris of me trying to do Ireland’s linguistic history in the first five pages”).

It tours the counties with affection and modesty, sometimes inventing a map where none exists simply to provoke the reader in Carlow or Clare into shouting back: “That’s not our word — this is our word.”

It admires the old Irish running under the English like groundwater; it argues, gently, that speaking a little Irish might, counter-intuitively, be the best way to preserve the English we actually speak.

There’s much rigour, too, disguised as play. He will happily disappear for an evening into the OED, tracing a usage through the centuries like a detective; he will just as happily email a novelist to ask if a pet word truly appeared in a book or did he Mandela-effect it.

He delights in the punk archaeology of etymology — the way Tayto is a toddler’s misfire made empire; the way Reddit can sometimes draw a blank that teaches you more than an answer would.

And there’s that small-country self-awareness again — our complicating modesty, our habit of playing ourselves down while getting the language up for visitors like a good suit. O’Regan doesn’t scold it. He simply notices the

usefulness: “We’re an island. We look at ourselves. We export ourselves. We talk about ourselves. And we keep talking because the counties still have identities. More words per square yard.”

If you sense a series in it — a podcast that ambles from parish to parish collecting sound the way The Rest Is History collects obscure emperors — you’re not wrong.

He laughs, happily imagining ‘The Rest Is Language’. The ideas are already simmering with the other pots: the climate work he keeps tipping away at; a half-dreamed popular maths book.

Talking about the book, he says, is how he discovers what the book actually is. “When you’re writing, you’re caught up in accuracy and structure,” he says.

“When you’re talking, you remember the joy that sent you there. That’s the why.”

If there’s a beating heart to the enterprise, it’s a small grief and a small hope. The grief is simple: people die and the way they said now dies with them. The hope is stubborn: someone, somewhere, decides not to let it.

“There’s that thing about dying twice,” O’Regan says. “I think there’s a third time: when the way you spoke no longer exists.”

He wrote this book to push that day back — for the quips of our forefathers, for yours, for the shop girl who once asked a blow-in “are you getting?” and teaches, on an ordinary afternoon, that a sentence is a map of a place.

At the end, he returns to the breakfast table and the battered copybook. “I want the 84-year-old to read it and say, ‘he’s wrong — we said this,’ and then write this down,” he smiles. “Let the archive argue with itself. That’s how you keep a language alive. Not with piety. With use.”

Gallivanting with Words is a brilliantly funny, companionable book, but it’s also a small act of citizenship. It asks for five minutes of your day and a pencil.

It believes in your mouth and your memory. And if the cloud goes dark tomorrow, it wants the next child to find, on a shelf, a word we saved.