We don’t use the word “naughty” in Ireland. We have a much better one: “bold”. I vastly prefer its connotations of brassiness, even bravery. Naughty (which for me resonates of businessmen dressed as babies and people who can’t get wood unless there are corsets involved) gives me the creeps.
There are way too many words specific to what is linguistically (and fancily) known as Hiberno-English to list them all. Some, like smithereens and brogues, have made it into Englisho-English. That’s nice. Too often, since I’ve been over here, I find myself saying something that gets me a puzzled look, or a patronizing smile. We have such a charming way with words. (Apparently.) Yes, we do take English words and twist them around to mean something else. We also have tons of words from Irish that we use during English speech and can’t really translate – even though only ten of us actually speak Irish (mostly Dara Ó Briain).
Some words that I miss because I can’t use them in England include:
mar dhea – pretending/ trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes: “Nothing he was selling was stolen…mar dhea.” A kind of Gaelic equivalent of “yeah, right” or “…NOT!” long before Mike Myers even knew where the wig-shop was.
thashpy - too much energy/ excess piss and vinegar. Although I’ve only ever heard it in West Cork, and applied to me. “Go outside and run around to knock some of the thashpy out of yourself.” (Said as recently as last Christmas. Mum’s is not a big house.) Possibly from teaspaigh as in dreoilín teaspaigh = a kind of grasshopper. Who knows? Not me. I was too busy running around to find out.
glic - clever with an edge of cunning. “He’s glic, that fella selling the mar dhea not-stolen stuff from the first example.”
plámás - schmooze/ distract someone with flattery. “Don’t try to plámás me: I’m too glic for that.”
flathúlach - generous, even flamboyantly so, but often used in the negative. “She wasn’t very flathúlach with the old wine, was she? We obviously didn’t plámás her enough.”
The last contains the “ch” sound that (to non-Irish speakers) makes people think you’re speaking Dutch, Arabic, or Klingon. All vastly more exotic than bog-standard Irishness, and identities I’m happy to assume. But if you ever think I’m Klingon, just don’t forget to be glic enough to be flathúlach with the Gach.
