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Where I live, no one has an accent, but as soon as I go five mile down the road, people start having accents.”
A Meath man said that at a Macra impromptu public speaking final and the line was a good summation of the peculiarities of words and variety of accents we have on this island. You can tell it wasn’t a west Corkonian who said it because we’d say miles when it’s plural, not mile.
The peculiarities of language may stem from our native tongue, language that has three ways of saying two and two ways of saying three. I had an awareness of a different vocabulary at a young age aided by the fact I never spent the full 52 weeks of the year in Cork.
For a few weeks every summer I was packed off to Mayo, where I’d be referred to as a young buck instead of a young fella.
Moving cattle
Moving cattle with my grandfather, I’d be told to: “Stand in by the whin bush.”
I’d be looking around clueless as to what he was referring to.
“The what?”
“No. The whin,” he’d say, gesturing to the thorny yellow-flowered bush behind me.
“Oh, the furze bush. Do you know it’s called gorse too?”
Returning to Cork, my grandfather in Ardfield would greet me with:
“Warra now?”
He had condensed the greeting, “Hello, how are you getting on?”
For a man not afraid of using words, I always found it funny that he kept his greetings short.
If you asked my grandmother how she was getting on you’d often get the answer: “Yerra, I’m strawkhauling away.”
It’s a Cork term for struggling along. Words like “arra”, “erra”, “musha”, “yarra” and “yerrah” have somehow found their way into the start of sentences. At the opposite side, “like” or “hai” have filled the gap between what you want to say and the full stop.
On some farms you climb a ditch, while in others you have to climb out of them. Ration, meal, nuts and you’ll hear some refer to it as cake are the same thing.
“M’on”, “m’up”, “m’out” are examples of what you might overhear in marts and yards from those driving cattle.
On a related note, while farmers talk about bullocks they are paid for steers. Maybe the etymology of the words stems from the fact that, steer is just a way for people wearing suits to talk about bullocks without the risk of sounding rude.
The four-pronged implement found in livestock yards has a variety of titles.
Dad recalled a story from the first year of his farm apprenticeship in Clogheen in Tipperary.
Fresh from north Mayo, he was picking stones in a field when an older man said he had a sprong at home that would make the job easier.
Dad waited in anticipation for this new stone-picking machine to arrive only to be greeted by a four-pronged pike. I bet if he told the story closer to when it happened it would have been a grape he referred to. In Cork, he discovered the potato grape was known as a beet pike. In other parts of the country it is a fork, but it’s a pike down here.
There’s something appealing about the vernacular and I hope the corporate blanding of farming language doesn’t ruin it too much.
Now I better go back power-washing and contemplate who’ll sweep the sheds or pick the low-hanging fruit.
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