If you’re offended by casual swearing… Ireland ain’t for you. July 7, 2018
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Object to swearing
If you’re offended by casual swearing, Ireland might not be the best holiday spot for you. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the Irish swear a lot in day-to-day conversations, even when they aren’t particularly angry. The occasionally controversial Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan describes this phenomenon as being a result of the Irish having been forced to adopt the English language against their will, saying ‘The English language doesn’t suit my soul…(It’s) like a brick wall between me and you and “fuck” is my chisel.’
True.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Reblogged this on Na trioblóidí.
LikeLike
I feel for the tour guides having to handle the ‘history’ questions – particularly in the North. I was on a tour of Dublin once with a party of other Brits, and one of our number was positively astounded at the way that references to Britain kept coming up – she’d genuinely never realised that our two nations had History. (God knows where she thought the Provos came from.) You can imagine the kind of questions she asked – one that sticks in my mind was “So why were there two rebellions?” After a few like that you’d just want to give them a hard stare and start singing Down by the Glenside.
LikeLiked by 1 person
🙂
LikeLike
The mention of getting ‘a round in’ brought some memories back. My Dad stopped going to the pub as an OAP in case he couldn’t afford to pay a round should he happen to get into one a big one accidentally. He retreated to having a few cans of beer at home alone instead.
And then there is the moocher, who pays for his own pint only and clings to the group imbibing every drink in the rounds endlessly. He’s never called out on it though. Peculiar how it goes.
LikeLike
Louis MacNeice said “ordinary people are peculiar too”, they “put up a barrage of common sense to baulk/ intimacy but by mistake interpolate/ swear-words like roses in their talk”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I really can’t understand opposition to swearing. You expect it from people concerned about propriety – the class-concerned, Hyacinth Bucket types, but I find it surprising when I come across it in others.
The US tendency to censor it is really odd. I once saw a US programme beep the word ‘ass’ – it’s incredible. (Isn’t ‘ass’ already basically censored, like ‘darn’ for ‘damn’ and so on?)
I wonder how much it correlates with the view that there is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ language in general? It’s still far too common a view that there’s some objectively correct English and not just a prestige dialect used to express power and class.
LikeLike
Yep, that sounds very plausible. Class is at the root of it I suspect. But also a hypocrisy in that even class aside there were spaces where it was fine for upper middle and upper class people to use it freely.
LikeLike
“I really can’t understand opposition to swearing.”
From our upper house, June 2018:
LikeLiked by 1 person
I suspect all subaltern versions of English all relished a bit of obscenity.
The Puritan English of the WASPs is an exception.
I’ve been re-reading Vikram Chandra and the Mumbai demotic English he uses is littered with bhenchods, maderchods and chutiyas.
LikeLike
‘Bhenchod’ (=bastard?) is an interesting one, as it had an afterlife in BritEng as “bangshoot” – usually “the whole bangshoot”, meaning roughly “the whole bloody thing”. Don’t think we borrowed either of the other two, though.
LikeLike
Er no – I’m not sure I should go into it any further on these austere pages but bhenchod brings together the signifiers ‘sister’ and ‘copulation’.
Incidentally English English slang ‘goolies’ also seems to have a Hindi root.
LikeLike