Book review: Get clued up on Irish slang

Colm O’Regan’s entertaining account of the Irish version of the English language is an etymologist’s delight, being nicely scholarly, but it wears its learning lightly, which means it’s accessible to all of us

Columnist, broadcaster, comedian, and author Colm O’Regan has offered an accessible opening to Ireland’s take on English. Picture: Chani Anderson

• Gallivanting with Words: How the Irish Speak English 
• Colm O’Regan 
• Gill Books, €16.99 

Stand-up comedian, bestselling author, and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O’Regan’s book is timely as the Irish language is suddenly trendy, with the likes of Kneecap deploying it to great effect and the newly-elected President wishing to have it as the main language at the Áras. 

Even the British ambassador to Ireland, Kara Owen, has been studying Irish as she says it helps her to understand Hiberno English. 

You can’t appreciate how we speak English unless you have some knowledge of Irish.

O’Regan has written an entertaining account of the Irish version of the English language. It is an etymologist’s delight, being nicely scholarly. 

But it wears its learning lightly, which means it’s accessible to all of us. And who among us has not pondered the way the Irish talk?

As O’Regan writes, Hiberno English is “still going strong despite dire warnings” that it is disappearing “in a flood of monoculture that comes to us through our phones”.

He adds that our unique take on the language has a powerful ally, namely “our absolute obsession with ourselves and what we are like at all at all”. 

With a potted history of Ireland and its influences on the English language, O’Regan points out that our version was brought here on ships, by soldiers, administrators, and planters, and it included bits of Flemish and French — from the Normans and the Huguenots — as well as Welsh. 

There are also elements of Latin and Viking colouring Hiberno English. And the language of Travellers is an influence.

The book is divided into sections such as politics, sport, love, the weather — and of course “the drink”. 

Never was there a subject with so many sly ways of describing the possibility of a big outbreak, a bender, or whatever you’re having yourself.

When someone says they’re probably going to “take it handy tonight”, they are inadvertently harking back to the 16th century when ‘handy’ was originally used in the area of handicrafts or manual labour. 

“But in Ireland, its use has exploded such that it could merit a chapter all by itself.”

While our young folk are spending more time in the gym than down the pub, the phraseology around getting drunk is really the preserve of the older generation. 

Some of them are still getting mouldy, a term used by Irish writers such as James Joyce and contemporary writer Lisa McInerney.

The Oxford English Reference Dictionary puts ‘mouldy’ on a par with ‘maggoty’ which we don’t use so much, observes O’Regan.

He has a keen ear for the phraseology used in Ireland that only a true Irish person utters. 

While O’Regan doesn’t know if it qualifies for Hiberno English, he says you can’t mention Mayo without mentioning Mayo4Sam. 

It was uttered by Joe Biden when he visited Ireland and it had to be parsed for the American media in case they assumed the reference was to Uncle Sam and that Biden was recruiting for the US military in Castlebar. As if.

The book has sections on different parts of Ireland. Turning to Cork, I see that O’Regan introduces the place by stating: 

“What word can you talk about but langer? The Tanora of slang, in that it’s rarely found north of Clonmel. It is designed to be said in a Cork accent. To give it the full vent you need the double-LL Welsh clanger.”

While ‘langer’ has become acceptable with use, there was a time when it was a very strong insult. There are various origins given as to its source. 

The popular one is that ‘langer’ came from the langur monkey which was “bothering Munster fusiliers in India”.

O’Regan writes that maybe it’s a case of sounding good: “‘You’re a langer’ just sounds like an insult.”

For this and other more complicated reasoning, the book deserves to be on every bookshelf in Ireland. It’s a part of who we are.