Have you any idea why in America they call the pavement …”the sidewalk” while we might at times make do with “the footpath” ? This kind of thing fascinates me .What about the word “yogurt”? I was making a litre of plain yogurt just now.Sometimes I get it right and sometimes if I’m not patient with it, I’ll get curds and whey instead.In any case it’s always handy to have some in the fridge for a breakfast change with some fruit or for making a raita to cool down a hot curry .It’s easy enough to make a pint or two for the same price as milk. While I was waiting for the milk to cool I was thinking about the word “yogurt”.You might know that the word is Turkish in origin ,”Yog” meaning to condense or intensify.That’s pretty much what happens when you make milk into the magical stuff.Turkey….eh?
Then again…..
There’s that possibility that you may have just finished snedding turnips or digging purties and on your way haim you might be afeard of the look of a young reckless blade or a backeb article standing there blocking your way. . You might birl around with your fadge tucked under your oxter or slip on the glar or the glit and heel up while some silly gorb gulders across the road while hanching at a burger dripping with sauce . He’ll think it a great handlin to see you slip and make a hash of crossing the street.As you hirple away with a hudderin stagger, you might think that the skitter was in need of a right skelp.
You might even watch the koboy kiffling and footering as he kugs the juices off his chin and think him a leazey latchiko or maybe, him a wee bit light and wish you could loodher the meely mudha and melder him one around the ears.Then you mind the mizzle and decide that the pahal with a head on him like a pake wasn’t worth a bowl of panadey anyway….besides …the stoor of that awful burger was already turning your stomach.
You might pigh and decide that the havirl looked like he was more in need of a physick and decide that the quah was only a ramiss merchant anyway and hardly worth a hogo rift.You might scobe your heid and hit him a skelp and set off home before this skift got any heavier and it began to really teem . Better to set off up the spink before that bloody spulpin said another word.He’d always be a thickward anyway. The world would look much better after a good bowl of stirabout, anyway , you finally decided…..
Now all of the above might sound like something out of Anthony Burgess’s book “A Clockwork Orange”, the language of the “story”,seeming to be either made up ,or completely nonsenical. Burgess wrote his book , partially ,in a Russian-influenced argot , which he called “Nadsat”and set it in a near-future timeframe where he supposed the language would approximate the speech of that time.
The piece that I’ve written above above uses many words that were the norm only a generation or two ago here in Norneverland and in fact , many still feature in our everyday speech in parts of this magical land.We still rattle many of them off without realising or even thinking about their provenance.I can remember my mother always called porridge “stirabout” and I still tease my grandchild with it when playing “aeroplanes” while feeding her .People will still be called “right kowboys”….All the words used above are very real words and their origins derive from Olde English, Dutch, German, the Norsemen of Vikings fame , Gaelic- Irish and Scots- Gaelic. Many have been bastardised , of course, and were adjusted and misspelt or re-jigged to suit local usage . The language has been ever-evolving just like the land and the people.
Americans use the word “sidewalk” instead of “pavement” or “footpath”, which the rest of the world seems to have adopted. They have their own reasons for doing this and no one would think of suddenly changing a word which actually offers a better description of the usage and utility than the other two words , but apparently “sidewalk” has older origins way back in a form of the old English tongue.They even call the peculiar new language that Americans use , “American English”, what with its “center”, it’s “color” and its “jail” and so on.
The Vikings seem to have had a big influence on the Irish language, especially in relation to sea-faring terms.They were a sea-faring nation ,just as the Irish were an island race ,after all. Some Irish words reflect their Norse origins.Irish words for fish such as “cod”,boat “bad”, anchor “anchaire” are all Viking words. The word for market “margadh” or the word for penny “pinginn” similarly came with our Norse visitors.I wonder how today’s visitors and settlers will eventually effect our speech patterns and language .
Only a generation ago very few in Norneverland would have known what yogurt was….the word or the substance. Never mind it s ancient origins with the pre-Christian goatherds ,in the land now called Turkey, a century or probably much longer ,before Christ ever existed …I can still remember being asked when I opened a small carton with my lunch , while sitting with some workmates years ago. Yogurt had a very low profile forty, fifty or sixty years back and it was a Swiss firm called “Ski”( naturally enough) who first tried marketing it as a dessert item in some UK shops in 1963.There were no supermakets to speak of so a few years later in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s it was really introduced to Ireland and the UK by health-food hippies of the time .It came with the cult for natural and organic foods… wholefoods, macrobiotic diets, vegan,tofu , vegetarianism and all the rest.
The first time I saw yogurt in its natural state was in the very early 1970’s in the Vondelpark outside Amsterdam .I was hitch- hiking from Belgium up through Holland ,and Germany to Denmark. The city was a hive of counter-cultural activity then and Dutch hippies were making and selling it as a health-food at the free rock concerts held in the park at weekends . They were adding fresh fruit, nuts and grains to pint pots of the stuff.”The Whole Earth Catalog”(SIC) showed how easily the stuff could be cheaply made in large quantities by heating milk and adding cultures to continue the process from one batch to the next. It wasn’t too long before Big Business figured out there was money to be made from simple milk by charging more money than it was actually worth and selling it in tiny containers as a super-food.Then the yogurt revolution took off.Today “yogurt” is seen as a “probiotic”super cure- all and is marketed with all sorts of health-bestowing properties …with a substantial price -hike to match. It’s funny how something so simple can enter the language as though it had always existed in popular culture.It’s really relatively recent here.
My fellow -workmates wouldn’t have known what the names of many foods were back then because they weren’t popularly on sale as they are now.Most, wouldn’t have known what a chapati or a carbonara was back then either , or vermicelli, penne or fusilli pasta , yet these are everyday items on our supermarket shelves today and appear regularly on household menus .People just hadn’t been exposed to them yet.My grand-daughter’s current favourite is something she calls “Pitty Pattys” which is warmed pitta bread with a melted cheese filling.As children , we wouldn’t have known what a pitta was.
Language is indeed a funny old thing , when you think about it. Like the cultures in yogurt ,It just never seems to stops evolving and growing.
When you talk about Vikings it suggests that some of these imports are also ancient words in the Scandinavian languages. When Seamus Heaney translated Beowulf as his peace making present to the English people he came across words in “Old English” that he said his mother had used which showed the connections between us. One was Thole which he said meant “suffer”. I worked for a bit with some Danish people. I asked if the knew the word and they said yes it just means “deal with it”. So we’re not just connected to ancient Vikings – there’s a Nordic strand in our language that connects us with other modern Northern European maritime people.
Sidewalk is a daaarlin’ word, PK, a daaaaarlin’ word.
Far more resonant and concrete than ‘footpath’ for sure. Hard to imagine Glen Campbell getting much change out of the f-word:
-I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway
Where hustle’s the name of the game.
Latchiko is another daaarlin’ word, one first heard by one on the sidewalks of O’Connell Street – by some rhinestone cowboys from Kerry. Sadly, it seems to have dropped out of circulation.
Mind you, not the only one.
Mum’s the word in the Mother Tongue
The mummification is gaining momentum
Of Mother Ireland, with the use of ‘Mum’
The near defunct Mammy
Is long considered gammy
Mother Nature abhors a cultural vacuum.
Yes Mighty Perk ..the “mummification” of Ireland , indeed .Twas a time when mums were only mammys and mum was most definitely not the word .I blame television for the anglicising of grammar, meself.That and the importation of potato-crisps into the south . I well -remember a pub -landlady away in the west who thought they were the spawn of an English devil and would “niver” be seen about her establishment while she lived ..the very bastardisation of the humble little “murphy”..Well do i remember the cheese-heavy aroma of Tudor crisps. An old English girlfriend once claimed that a neigbour’s family had masterminded the first crisp in a garden shed somewhere in darkest Bletchley …(could it have been Mr Walker?)….but i trumped her with the first cheese and onion wonderspuds issuing from Ireland’s very castle of spuds , Tayto of Tandragee.
In the shiny tracksuit suburbs, both inner and outer, of Dublin, PK, ‘crisps’ are NEVER pronounced as anything other than ‘cripps’. Ever.
This social fox pas has caused many a manicured hand in Foxrock and other pinstriped purlieus of the same city to be thrun up in exasperation by the practitioners of the exact elocution of Elizardbethan English. Which is where the latter are wrong, and not for the first time neither. The same purlieus where it is fashionable to pronounce the once and past Uncrowned King of Ireland aka Avondale’s Proud Eagle, thus:
-PARnell, rather than that overheard from the herd: ParNELL.
Of course, while old Charles Steward P. was an accomplished jockey (it was, alas, to be his downfall) it is uncertain if the noted jockey Buster Parnell was a descendant, as the latter’s name was only every pronounced Par NELL.
The reason for this Americanisation of the PARnell name in Dortland may well be down to his mother’s American birth, a la Churchill. Whereas an Irish garda will say: if you don’t come move along now, I will ARREST you, an American cop will say: if you don’t move your ass, I WILL arrest you.
Sinn Fein / An Phoblacht HQ, for instance, is located not in PARnell Square but in ParNELL Square. Indeed, those of a Georgian geometric inclination would argue it is not even located in ParNELL Square but rather in (gulp) The ParNELLogram, Dublin 1.
But back to the past: as usual the toffee-nosed toffs have got it wrong, the same toffs of trouser-crease territory , the insufferable Rugga Mums of which gated territory drop their lower class originated accents off with the same aplomb as they drop their oval-balled offspring off at their nearest or farthest tough-luv fee-paying CSSP college in their not inconCSSPicuous SUVs.
For the shiny track-suited Whitneys and Waynes in the cripps-munching suburbia of Dublin do not do their pronunchiating as a gesture of class-baiting provocation but rather out of a strangely overlooked, deep and abiding appreciation of the distinguished Labour politician and MP for BrIstol who was Minister for Aircraft Production during the Hitler Bother. And who later became the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Be downsitting and put your teeth together for:
-Sir Stafford Cripps.
Of course, cripps, like many another noble invention for the dietary tract, has never been quite the same since the concept of diversification was introduced by hostile take-over merchants, consisting in the main of misguided tastebud fascists. The original tasty CEO of cripps will also be the CEO for those of us who cherish taste. Even though the same CEO is becoming increasingly difficult to source, never mind locate.
-Cheese Et Onion.
Words, indeed, PK, is a daaarlin invention.
Take indeed the word ‘suburb’ itself as contemporary, one would have thought, as, say, Wikipedia or even shiny tracksuit itself. One can still recall the recognizable shock one received on first coming across it in one of Shakespeare’s plays.
Was it Julius H. Caesar?
The rustics are sometimes sneered at for pronouncing our staple fungi as musheroons when, in fact, this is closer to the original French moucheron than the Sacs-Béarla strangulation.
In my neck of the woods our regional dialect has been described as the ugliest in America – have they never heard a Bostonian speak!?
The mash up has been influenced by the Ulster, German eastern European and more to make pittsburghese what it is. Yinz taking the trolley upstreet t’buy summa chipped ham n’at? Ma’s worshing and redding up the house and the floor’s slippy. Words are a lovely invention
slippery buggers, though, Sarah….