A bonus of the discovery of 4,000-year-old axe heads in Westmeath, as reported yesterday, was evidence that a vintage Hiberno-English adverb is still alive and well in the speech habits of those parts.
Commenting on the National Museum’s reaction, farmer Thomas Dunne – in whose field the axes turned up – declared: “They’re horrid happy over this whole discovery.”
I tend to associate the positive use of “horrid” with Cavan people, for some reason, although the sole example of usage cited in Terry Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English is from Meath. And that’s a negative one: “He’s horrid failed.”
But to be “horrid happy” is as happy as you can be in the north midlands. Whereas farther west, as I was reminded a while back, the optimum is to be is “happy out”.
Out and proud – Frank McNally on being “horrid happy” and other Hiberno-English states of mind
Soldiers Are We (Not) – Frank McNally on the beauty of Brian Boydell’s Amhrán na bhFiann
Making waves – Guglielmo Marconi and three generations of Irish-Italian women
Reel-life pioneer – Mary Rose Callaghan on Ellen O’Mara Sullivan, a trailblazer of Irish cinema
Having dinner in a Spiddal hotel one evening, a friend and I were asked by the waitress: “Are ye happy out?” For a moment, I thought she was suggesting a move to an indoor table: we were on the terrace and the air was starting to cool.
But of course, she just meant to inquire if the food was okay and did we need anything else. So in the same spirit with which restaurant staff are now trained to declare your every order “perfect”, she used the local superlative.
In fairness, while eating, we were also watching the sun go down on Galway Bay. “Happy out” was not much of an exaggeration.
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Long-time reader and occasional diarist Norman Freeman writes to ask my thoughts on two verbal idiosyncrasies he associates with the northern half of the country, encapsulated in the following phrase: “You’ll not win much money playing cyards but.”
He used to hear such constructions from his maternal grandfather, who lived on the Cooley peninsula. And I’m sure I’ve heard the “sentence-ending but” there too, although I also think of it as a classic Derry/Donegal thing.
As for the insertion of the “y” sound after certain consonants, Norman believes that extends beyond Ulster to North Leinster, and gives another typical example: “He got into the cyar to go to Mullingyar, but he was arrested by the Gyards.”
Getting back to the “sentence-final but”, as it’s also called, that’s a surprisingly international phenomenon, widely heard not just to Scotland but in Australia and New Zealand too.
As for the “y” sound after “c” (in particular), I believe it’s a vestige of the slender “c” in Irish, as in the words ceist or ceann. It’s definitely a habit in many Ulster counties. But strange to say I don’t think it’s as widespread in Cyavan.
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On the subject of axes, Bronze Age and otherwise, I’m reminded that you can axe (or at least ax) someone in Ireland without doing them serious damage.
That’s because “ax” is a dialectical variant of “ask”. Although speaking of violence, in Dolan’s dictionary, the first typical usage cited is: “Don’t ax me again or I’ll give you a box in the ear.”
The habit is probably dying out now, but it contributed to a piece of Irish literary history once, thanks to a famous ax-man called Andy Clarkin.
He was a Fianna Fáil senator and Dublin lord mayor, who also ran a coal merchant’s shop in Pearse Street, attached to which there was a clock that had been long stopped.
This detail attracted the attention of Irish Times columnist, Myles na gCopaleen.
And because Clarkin was from Mullingar, his malfunctioning clock chimed with one of Myles’s running themes: the neglect/ruination of Dublin by culchie politicians.
The resultant columns, which ran for weeks on either side of Christmas 1951, involved an ingenious acronym, ACCISS.
This not only stood for “Andy Clarkin’s Clock is Still Stopped”. It also included a pun on one of Clarkin’s speech habits and a certain deference to his wife that, combined, often caused him to say that before doing something, he’d have to “ax Cis”.
For a time, Myles even used ACCISS as the title of his column, instead of the usual Cruiskeen Lawn. When axed – sorry, asked – about it, he said the regular sign had been “taken down to be repainted”.
Unfortunately, in his exuberance, he also allowed himself to be photographed alongside the offending clock. And according to Anthony Cronin, biographer of the real-life Myles – civil servant Brian O’Nolan – the resultant cutting was added to his personnel file in the Department of Local Government.
Unfortunately also, that had the effect of undermining a (true) cover story that sometimes protected O’Nolan against the anger of his political bosses: namely that there was at least one, maybe two, regular stand-ins who also wrote as “Myles”.
Thus when, a year after the ACCISS-all-areas campaign, a February 1953 instalment of Cruiskeen Lawn included one too many insults to his Minister, O’Nolan was finally forced to resign.
His performance in the day job had been impaired by drinking anyway. But from them on, he was a full-time writer. And although expulsion from the Civil Service led to some penury in later years, he was probably – as they say in Galway – happy out.