17 Divided by a Common Language

Posted by on Oct 20, 2014 in Ireland | 8 comments When Michael O’Brien was guiding Agnes Scott students around Ireland, we would occasionally come upon an English word that one of us didn’t understand, or that had multiple meanings depending on context, or that was simply unfamiliar, or that didn’t exist in American English or in Irish English. Michael would give a look of mock despair and exclaim, “Divided by a common language!” While Irish English is perfectly understandable most of the time in both vocabulary and accent, such moments do arise. One of the most appealing characteristics of English is its regional variations that define not only parts of the world and countries, but regions within countries, states, and even cities. For a long time I’ve collected interesting and fun examples of Irish English, and now that I’m here for an extended stay, my list is growing rapidly. From time to time, I’ll show off my collection here. Warning! If you are easily offended, read no further. There is one word that I’ve learned not to use here in Ireland: pitcher. Yes, the word meaning that thing you use to pour milk into coffee or water into glasses. The more common word here is jug, and when I say “pitcher,” I always get confused looks. People hear “picture,” it seems. When questioned, they know what a pitcher is, but the word is archaic to them: “Something from ancient Greece in a museum,” someone explained to me. I’ve now trained myself to say “jug”: “Can we have a jug of water for the table, please?” “Feck off!” “What’s your feckin’ problem?” “For feck’s sake!” Don’t be offended. I haven’t sunk to a new vulgar low. Feck is a very common word here in Ireland. You hear it every day, and you hear it on television. In most (but not all) cases it is considered a family friendly version of “the f-word,” to use that most euphemistic of all euphemisms. There are debates about its origin, but one argument suggests that it comes from the Irish word feic, which means “see.” I have to tell you that there are loads of words in Irish that sound a lot like the f-word when pronounced emphatically, including the word for word itself, focal, pronounced to rhyme with buckle. What this means about Ireland, I don’t pretend to know. The culture surrounding feck and the f-word is just very different here—the words are...
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16 Autumn Gardens

Posted by on Oct 16, 2014 in Ireland | 0 comments “Fall” is the more common term in English, fhómhair in Irish (pronounced like the English “four” but with a more obvious diphthong) but “fall gardens” even if lower-cased sounds like THE fall in THE garden and I don’t mean that. I mean that time of year “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon the boughs which shake against the cold,” that time of year when gardens start to sag and fade but are still beautiful, maybe even more so, as their colors blend with the red and orange and yellow and brown leaves on the ground, when the silhouettes of trees and shrubs start to emerge from their foliage, “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”* What I love about visiting gardens in the fall is seeing everything in transition, the summer waning, the winter setting in, and even hints of spring amid the long shadows and touches of cold. The stems and blooms that have long died linger as pale brown ghosts alongside the rich fall flowers—here in Ireland they include black-eyed susans, michaelmas daisies, hardy plumbago, californian lilac, cyclamen, lilyturf ,and so many more. I didn’t know there were autumn crocuses until I saw a carpet of them yesterday. Recently I visited two autumn gardens, one at Mount Stewart on Strangford Lough in County Down and another at Kilmacurragh in County Wicklow. Mount Stewart was the seat of the Marquess of Londonderry and is now in the possession of the National Trust. The neo-classical house and its contents and the extraordinary grounds are very well preserved, and on the day I visited, very well used by the public. A fall festival was going on with food vendors, children’s games, traditional singing and dancing, and a state-fair style competition for baked goods, garden produce, and flower arranging. The gardens were designed by the imaginative Edith, Lady Londonderry and include a Shamrock Garden with topiary in the shapes of Irish symbols and the famous Dodo Terrace. I’ve seen them vivid and gorgeous in the full intensity of a hot July day, but I think I like them even better at this time of year. By contrast, the grounds at Kilmacurragh were almost deserted, but this place is less well known than Mount Stewart and much less geared to visitors. The house and grounds now belong to the National Botanic Gardens thanks to one...
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15 The Mountains of Mourne

Posted by on Oct 9, 2014 in Ireland | 11 comments On our driving map of Ireland, quite a few roads in southeast County Down are highlighted in green, which means they are “scenic.” The map is pretty reliable on this point, though of course there are many non-green routes that deserve to be so designated, as Ron and I indignantly note when we’re driving on them. This green-striped region is one of the few parts of Ireland I’d never visited, and it is also where the woman Agnes Scott College is named for lived as a child, the young Agnes Irvine. She sailed to the US in 1817, a girl of eighteen, settling in Pennsylvania, marrying and raising a family. Her son General George Washington Scott would found the college named for her in 1889, one hundred and twenty-five years ago this year. County Down is only about ninety minutes from Dublin, a border county with a long seacoast on the Irish Sea, and is home to Ulster’s tallest mountain range, the very same mountains Agnes Irvine and her mother Mary Stitt Irvine missed when they emigrated in 1817, never to return, the Mountains of Mourne. Some people say “Mourne Mountains,” but “Mountains of Mourne” as in Percy French’s 1896 ballad, sounds so much better. The name actually comes from a Gaelic clan name, Múghdhorna, pronounced pretty much like “mourn” and a perfect illustration of how in the Irish language, whenever you see a pile-up of vowels, you can be sure they won’t be pronounced. I wanted to see this part of Ireland and to understand the pull of those mountains. I think the photo at the top of the page explains why the Irvines loved the Mountains of Mourne. Though you can see them from all over the region and out at sea, the best place for a view is along the coast of Dundrum Bay between Newcastle and St. John’s Point, where you’re looking south across the water to the mountains. Standing on this stretch at Tyrella Beach about fifteen miles north of where Agnes lived near Kilkeel, I could grasp the origin of the refrain of the ballad that celebrates them, “Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.” French must have been thinking of this exact view. I snapped over fifty pictures, hoping to capture the changing light, the roll of the waves, the sheen on the rocks, the shore birds darting about...
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14 Uisce Éireann / Irish Water

Posted by on Oct 6, 2014 in Ireland | 0 comments On a rainy day last January I was with a group of students at Kylemore Abbey, an elegant Gothic Revival edifice set by itself on a lake in Connemara. The enterprising nuns of the Abbey have a large gift store and café going there, so Kylemore is quite a tourist destination for both its beauty and its amenities. While in the bathroom that day, I noticed a gushing faucet in one of the sinks. I couldn’t make it stop running, so I reported it to someone in the café who looked like she was in charge. “Oh thanks,” she said nonchalantly, “It’s not a problem, but I’ll let someone know.” Not a problem! Coming from Atlanta where a drought forces water restrictions on us every few years and where I try desperately to keep our own water bills under control, I was shocked. But looking at the big lake nearby, thinking about the surrounding boglands, Killary Harbour (a true fiord) just a couple of miles away, lakes and stream everywhere, and the rain pouring down at that moment, I could see why she wasn’t too worried about the gushing faucet. There is and there always has been, plenty of water in Ireland. As of last Wednesday, 1 October 2014, however, Irish people in the Republic may begin to adopt a different attitude towards gushing faucets. On that day, they started paying for their water for the first time in history. Of course, water systems across the country have always been paid for through government spending and taxes, and water was rationed during “the Emergency,” what the neutral Irish called World War II, but this is the first time citizens have had to pay directly for the water they use. The predictable jokes were making the rounds last week: “I guess we’ll be seeing more beards now!” “I’m coming over to your house to shower.” The newspapers have been madly calculating how much a shower or a toilet flush will cost. According to the latest estimates, the average yearly bill for two adults will be about $350—not much more than what I pay at home for one month in a hot Atlanta summer when I’m irrigating the garden. Bills will be calculated quarterly on the basis of meters or assessed charges, and those who use less will pay less. Children are “free” and there are allowances for people with illnesses...
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13 Folding Landscapes

Posted by on Oct 2, 2014 in Ireland | 6 comments Rummaging through boxes in my parents’ attic one day back in the seventies—hoping to find items to fill up my new apartment—I came upon a pink-flowered china coffee server, a pitcher of sorts, lidless and dusty, that had once belonged to my mother’s parents. It wasn’t valuable or useful, but it was kind of pretty, and I remembered seeing it on the mantle in my grandparents’ tiny house when I was five or six. I took it with me and kept it for years in a china cabinet with other bits and pieces from the attic and from flea markets I visited over the years. One day in the spring of 2000, some twenty-five years later, my brothers and I and our families were cleaning out my parents’ house prior to selling it. It was a tough day for us. I sequestered myself in the attic where I could cry secretly and where most of the packing up had already been done. As I drifted around the dark, musty room, something on the window sill caught my eye. There was the lid of the china coffee server—the unmistakable pattern and shape telling me instantly what it was. Why was it on the window sill? Why hadn’t it been packed or thrown away years ago? How had I missed it a quarter of a century earlier? What made me look at the window? Finding it somehow made me feel better, took the edge off that difficult day. Back in Atlanta a few days later, I reunited lid and pitcher, the lid settling perfectly into place with a soft clink. Sometimes the stars align, and a few pieces of life’s chaotic jigsaw puzzle come together unexpectedly; for a moment, you can almost imagine the picture you’re working to assemble. I had another of these moments a few weeks ago on a cloudy Friday afternoon in Roundstone, Co. Galway, a small village perched on a bay. Ron, our friends from California Mark and Maureen, and I were spending a long weekend exploring the western part of Connemara, and our B&B host from the night before in Spiddal had urged us to visit Roundstone on the drive to Clifden, saying it was a “lovely place.” And indeed it was, even on that gray day. Brightly painted houses and shops lined the one main street curving up a small hill above a tiny harbor,...
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