My favourite of all the words is a word that my Granny used to use, we assumed it was a
made-up word. It was only recently I discovered the proper origin of this word.
If we had asked my Scottish Granny what's for lunch, she would have rooted about in the fridge,
she would have hoked about and found an egg and found a bit of cheese and found some milk
and she'd have said, Kickshaws. What on earth is kickshaws? I assumed it was just one of
my Granny's funny words. But much, much later, this is just a few years ago, I was reading
the poetry of Robert Ferguson, who was a predecessor of Robert Burns in Scotland, one of Burns'
great heroes is his literary big brother, and came across the word Kickshaws in the
very context of something to eat. And it turns out that actually it goes right back historically
to the old alliance between France and Scotland and the French word for something is quelle
que chose, and when the Scots got quelle que chose and pronounced it in their Scottish
accent, they got kickshaws. So, kickshaws is a word that our family uses all the time.
If you are rummaging round to see what you are going to throw together for lunch and
there's nothing very inspiring in the fridge, you'll be eating kickshaws.
There isn't really any translation for that Ulster- Scots word Thran.
It speaks of a whole
culture and attitude. It doesn't just mean awkward. There is no other word to substitute
for it. Of course, it's a, it derives from Scots and it also derives from an old English
word which means to twist, so I suppose twisted would be the best translation there is. But
in terms of attitude, thran is the only word that quite characterises that.
Well I think Phrases which are associated with Love and are particularly
interesting in Irish. I’ve often been asked about the English phrase “I love You”,
and how it would be said in Irish and does it translate directly at all. If you were
in Donegal and you hear the Donegal community speak, a mother or father speaking to a child
perhaps you’d hear certain things such as “croi isteach for Mammy ‘heart into ‘Mammy
or Daddy. And of course, ‘croi is the Irish Word for ‘heart’ and ‘heart into Daddy’
there is something very personal and gentle about it and I enjoy that as turn of phrase
The Strone one I like, because my great aunt used to do that, they were, they'd this very
empty kitchen, and yet suddenly this wealth of food appeared from apparently nowhere,
and there was always tea, there was always tea. And, as I said, they would say to my
father, now, a wee strone of tea, David?
The word meitheal came to me, Which means to cooperate and work together in the community
to get things done. In the past, if someone was ill or there was a widow in the community,
the men would come together and they’d cut the turf for them.
Well, my father in law was a dialect speaker, although he had travelled round the world
a bit to do with his job, but he still sort of retained a good vocabulary of Ulster dialect.
And one of his favourites was Clanjamfrey.
And I had the whole family, a dozen of them,
for lunch on Sunday, it was absolute bedlam and I just looked around and I thought: Grandpa
would be saying, what a Clanjamfrey, the whole rabble, the whole mixture, mixture and noise,
you know. It's such an expressive one that, I just, I just love that bit of it. The other
ones are things that I would remember a lot from my Scottish childhood funnily enough,
and things like Tholin’. You know, we put up with things and Tholin’ is a very, very
old way of expressing that. I think it's very expressive, but it is actually an old English
one. That is a very, very early English expression.
Lurgan Spade is one that sticks in my mind, because of course there's a place called Lurgan,
and why shouldn't there be a type of spade named after Lurgan? But the museum had extensively
consulted manufacturers of spades and nobody knew of a Lurgan spade, it's actually Irish,
Lurgan spade. It's the shaft of a spade. So, if somebody has a face like a Lurgan spade,
they have a long face.
Get more from The Open University
Check out the links on screen now.