Pity foreign nationals as they try to navigate their way through our version of the King’s English.
For instance, how do you explain to them the meaning of the word “grand”, as we use it?
“It’s a grand day” is fairly straightforward, but when you respond “grand” to a question as to how you are feeling, does that mean “... just okay? Fine? Great?” Or, at the end of an argument, when you say “grand!” before walking away, does it mean you agree or is it a total breakdown? Or, when you say the Grand Canyon is “grand”, are you belittling it?
I remember how, during an intense conversation with an American relation I interjected, as we do, with “you’re not serious!” She stopped dead, looked me straight in the eye and said “I AM serious,” as though I’d accused her of lying. An attempt at explanation made it worse. It felt like I had been caught out, but really believed she was pulling the wool over my eyes.
10 of the best new shows to watch in April: including Netflix medical drama and two AppleTV+ releases
MobLand review: Pierce Brosnan’s Irish accent is a horror for the ages. Forget licence to kill, this is more Darby O’Gill
Steve Wall: ‘When Bono was offered the medal, I tweeted: Surely he won’t accept that. I didn’t know he already had’
‘It is so expensive in Dublin we decided to rent’: Swedish embassy returns to capital
Another phrase that stopped Americans dead was when I pointed to a dishevelled friend and said “...look at the absolute state of that.” The response was total confusion. How do you translate?
And there’s our seeming obsession with the word “now”; as in “there you are now”. Or “ah now!” (surprise), “hold on now” (halting the discussion), “now, then”, (pausing it) or “bye now”. Worse is that long goodbye at the end of our phone calls: “bye, bye, bye, bye...” (why, why, why, why?)
Yes, we do say “I’m after walking the dog” and “isn’t he after getting a red card!” and (hopefully) “despite which we won the match, so we did”.
Naturally, I blame the English.
As for our use of that word “sound”, it takes years of immersion in things Irish to convey that it has nothing to do with hearing but means someone/thing is solid, reliable, dependable.
Plain English has to be as confusing to those unfamiliar. How do you convince someone that “the Polish shop window over there needs a polish” or that “the tear in that girl’s dress brought a tear to her eye” or that to “make sure the wind doesn’t wind that electric cable around you” is proper English?
Homonyms, from Latin homonymum, Greek homonymon, for words of the same spelling but different meaning/sound.
