A recent restaurant menu offered "Panfried Skate" with "French Fried Potatoes". To those who still speak Hiberno-English this translates as: "ray and chips", but if your restaurant is set in the heart of the Pembroke Estate, the most elegant area of central Dublin, that sort of talk is regarded as verging on the obscene, writes Seamus Martin
Hiberno-English here is replaced by a dialect best described as UKainian.
It is a remarkable process that transmogrifies the "ray" you buy in the supermarket or even the most fashionable fish shop suddenly into "skate" when it hits a restaurant menu. The fish conversely retains its Hiberno-English name in the chipper. I once questioned a waiter on why his establishment insisted on using the word "skate". I was told, with a measure of condescension, that this was a "French restaurant". My options at this stage were to explain that in French the fish is known as "raie" (pronounced "ray") or to keep my mouth shut. I chose the latter and ordered the duck.
The duck breast, according to the menu, was to be "panfried". To "panfry" without a hyphen should, if the laws of phonetics are properly observed, be pronounced roughly to rhyme with "Santry". When the hyphen is included then the words "pan" and "fry" retain their original pronunciation. But what does "pan-fried" mean? I presume it simply means "fried" and that the word "pan" is superfluous. It is, after all, an extremely difficult culinary task to fry a duck breast in a hat, or a shoe, or indeed in your pocket. A pan of some sort must be used for frying unless one reverts to the traditional method of the navvies of yore who were known to fry rashers and eggs in their shovels over the night watchman's brazier.
The brazier that kept the watchman's hands warm on winter nights was often filled with coke, but turf, the perfumed fuel of our native bogs, was also used. Nowadays there isn't a sod of turf left in the whole country. The word has hardly been used in this newspaper for years, outside the racing pages. All we have left is "peat". This paper has frequently raised concerns that our peat resources may run out but it has failed to recognise that turf is already a thing of the past.
This brings me to Atlanta, in the US state of Georgia, where I came across a vegetable that is on the verge of extinction in upmarket Dublin shops. The vegetable stall I encountered in the American south was selling an exotic product that it described as "scallions". Those who panfy their skate over a peat fire know these as "spring onions", even if the cooking process is carried out in the depths of winter.
Skate, peat and spring onions are available to the consumer on the "high street" while ray, turf and scallions can be bought in "the shops" which are situated "down town" or on "the main street", depending on where you live.
I live in Dublin which has a "high street" where, the last time I checked, there was just a tool-hire outlet and a shop that sold prams, or more accurately babies' buggies. "High street prices", therefore, to someone who lives in Dublin, should logically be confined to the cost of hiring a lump hammer or buying a buggy that folds up in order to be stowed away on the bus. Illogically, the term appears to apply to the price of everything when used by those who don't go by bus.
These thoughts came to me the other day when a young woman was reading the weather forecast on television. She put the heart crossways in me by announcing that "The Clyde" was on its way "dine from the Nwerth". Visions appeared in my mind of Glasgow's river descending on me on a day when I had left the gamp at home. For those who don't understand the above, it should be explained that putting the heart into such a transverse position means merely giving one a sharp shock. A gamp, by the way, is an umbrella.
The young woman on the box, incidentally, was not warning us of an unprecedented Scottish inundation. What she actually meant to convey to her listeners through her fashionable, but strangulated, vowels was that "the cloud" was on its way "down from the north".
The recent census asked us about our proficiency in the Irish language, often described by my late and dear friend and colleague Breandán Ó hEithir as "the sweet and kingly tongue of the Gael".
Question 12 enquired firstly if we spoke the language. It went on to ask how often we spoke it, such as "daily within the education system", or "daily outside the education system", or "weekly", or "less often", or "never".
It is too late for this census, but perhaps the Central Statistics Office might try to find out in five years' time the status of the second official language - the Hibernian version of English. The following suggestions might help those drafting questions for 2011.
Question 12: "D'ye talk English at all?" This would attempt to ascertain whether or not you have a basic knowledge of the language.
Question 13, "D'ye talk English at all, at all?" This would be for those who panfry skate.
Question 14, "Where is the High Street? (a) Not far away. Or (b) in England." This would be aimed at those who panfry skate with spring onions.
Question 15: "Where will you be and what will you be doing on St Stephen's Day?" This could test the linguistic ability of those who panfry skate with spring onions over a peat fire on Boxing Day.