Breda O’Brien: ‘Shellackybooky’ – English as my mother spoke it

This Christmas, I found myself with tears in my eyes about a pudding. And not even a real one, but the memory of a pudding. My mother is 15 years dead this year, and I found myself thinking about the Christmas pudding that she used to steam in a gallon tin.

She was never satisfied with it, because it was crumbly and did not hold its shape. I still think it was the best pudding ever made, and that includes the ones my husband makes, which everyone raves about.

I can’t even eat Christmas pudding any more, as flour of any kind makes me first cranky, then crampy, and finally, catatonic. So why am I getting sentimental about a pudding?

I blame Jennifer O’Connell. She wrote a marvellous piece recently about the way we Irish speak English, and it immediately made me think about my mother.

Mother tongue

There is a reason we call language our “mother tongue”. My mother had hundreds of phrases and words I hear very rarely today. I find myself explaining some of them with the words, “as my mother always used to say”.

My kids slag me mercilessly about them, and about the fact that I start saying things like "wicked" when I speak on the phone to my brother who lives in Waterford.

It’s not the“wicked’ of today’s slang – it means something shockin’ bad.

Some of my mother’s expressions were just standard in Waterford, like saying “shellackybooky” for snail. And of course she rolled her Rs, and called every woman, no matter what her age, girrl, as in “No botherr, girrl”.

But some of her sayings defied explanation. For example, if you were in danger of getting too full of yourself, she would inform you that you were getting a head like a pot. Or she might say sarcastically, “You deserve a bun baked standing”.

I still have no idea what that one meant. How else would you bake a bun? On its side?

She had one expression that she used regularly about me, because I was inclined to be very pale. She used to say that I looked like something dragged out of a river. It was only when I used it to a friend in college, and saw her shocked expression, that I ever thought about its literal meaning.

A harsh wind would“skin yeh,” while a critical person had “a tongue like a lash”. Someone inclined to give out was likely “to ate you without salt”.

While the Waterford slang for a girlfriend was “lack”, my mother would never have used that expression seriously, but if she said someone had a lack in him, in her lexicon it meant that he had no common sense or empathy.

Of someone who had changed beyond recognition she would say she“wouldn”t know him, or the sky over him”. If someone was cunning, he probably “knew more than his prayers”.

She rarely if ever swore, but invoked “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” on a regular basis, on the grounds that it was a prayer. I believed that one for years.

Reference to prayer also occurred when someone was annoying. “I said prayers for that fella, I can tell yeh”. It meant the opposite, naturally.

Mind mice Someone who was enterprising in a bad way would “mind mice at crossroads”. A mean person“wouldn”t give you the steam off his porridge”.

A disputatious person would be capable of “making trouble in heaven”, or if really cranky, of“fighting with his toenails”.

The skinny were“thin as a rake”, whereas a heavy person was“gone out of the way altogether”. When she made too much food, she would muse that she had made enough“to feed a thrashing”. I think that one came from the custom of neighbours getting together to save oats or barley, with the original expression being “threshing”.

She couldn”t put a sentence together in Irish, but something that was a mess was “trína chéile” and a stupid woman was still “an óinseach”, and of course, just as Jennifer O”Connell pointed out, delph always smashed into smidiríní.

Ah, but she was in the ha’penny place compared to my mother-in-law, Pat, from Dungannon, who used extraordinary phrases. Her daughters’ minor lapses in tidiness drew allegations of being “dirty, clarty, lazy and through-other”. If frustrated in one of her plans, she would declare that she was “rightly scundered”.

Strangely enough, Pat used the identical pudding recipe to my mother, but hers emerged looking like a magazine illustration. She told me sadly that she would much preferred to have been able to make it crumbly like my mother’s.

Kathleen, my mother, was shy and introverted, and no one ever accused Pat, my mother-in-law, of being either. But they were both small women with huge hearts, and fierce unflinching loyalty to their family, friends and faith. It is not just their wonderfully expressive words that I miss, and not just long-gone puddings that make me cry. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.