Great artwork from Allan Cavanagh of Caricatures Ireland.ie
I can remember neither what I was talking about, nor to whom I was was talking.
Maybe the horror of the moment blew a few neuronic fuses.
What I know for sure is that I said
“…super excited…”
to somebody about something.
I'm unsurprised yet sorrowful.
I know all that ‘language is a liquid’ stuff and I’ve had fun observing how my spoken idiom and vernacular have wobbled and whimpered as I moved around the world.
After three months of working in a garage in Melbourne, doing B-Hits with my Work Mates during Smoko, a city taxi driver said
“Chroist, ye dant sowned loik a Pom.”
Let me tell you, as a Pom speaking here: taxi drivers don’t like losing the chance to deliver a good slagging, so I must’ve talked pure Aussie after only 12 weeks.
Here in Ireland my accent wanders from full Mitchell Brother to Plastic Paddy, but errs mostly towards the Home Counties, as we privileged few from the Home Counties like to call the Home Counties.
I know I’ve been culturally colonised by the USA. I drink coke and wear jeans, eat burgers and watch movies. I love American writers and remember when people started saying “No Way!” in our suburban London lives in the early 80s. Might’ve been the 70s.
Who knows?
Who cares?
Do I sound American yet?
Point being, we all loudly cried “No Way!” with smiles on our faces, to get a laugh, because to us, back then, it sounded aggressive, impolite and over-assertive.
Yet now it sounds so weak that’s hard to believe.
The hyperbole that started way back with freedom, contraception and The Beatles, that’s all ended up as meaningless vacuous iconic super excited sick super great crap.
And it’s not going away, but it will morph into something else.
And I said “Super excited” and a part of me hates that I’m so weak.
And the other part of me knows that has nothing to do with it.
I’m just assimilating.
Grunt by grunt, inflection by verbal twitch, blow-ins like me start to osmose the Irish way of speaking English.
Despite Howya! sounding so similar to the English ‘How are you?’, the Irish person saying it requires no response, or one of three answers.
Back in England it would be perfectly acceptable to reply
“Bloody terrible actually. The dog bit me, I got burgled and then the bloody car broke down.”
But here in my adopted country, the only acceptable responses must be either
Grand!
Mighty!
or
Not a bother on me!
spoken as one word.
It’s tough on depressives, especially during periods when your voice doesn’t sound as convincing as it might.
At those times so as not to draw attention to your pathetic human neediness, it’s best to string all three responses together, and utter them at speed (for the more advanced class):
Mighty grand not a bother on me!
Then there’s the shopkeepers’ masterpiece of enigma. Now! fired across the counter.
Now what?
Now who?
Should I do something?
Takes you by surprise at first, alongside the So! and that much-beloved double whammy
So now! and Now so!
Next out of your mouth comes the positively effervescent Thanks A Million!
Such hyperbolic gratitude for buying a single postage stamp in England would sadly be seen as taking the piss, but here it offers a delightful alternative to the bland English Ta very much!
The wonderful Why Wouldn’t I? now tumbles out of my mouth alongside all variations of Yer Wan, Yer Man and the splendid No Finer Man.
Sometimes my assimilation can take me by surprise. Never thought I’d become a Day That’s In It person, but now that’s there, and on at least one occasion I’ve been deeply shocked to hear myself go
Lookit!
in public.
I had to take a moment.
What next?
I Do Be?
Now in the latter stages of my assimilation, I play arpeggios of my adopted lingo.
String together C’mere to me!, add a little Now! and a smidge of So! and all of a sudden I’m inviting Dalooney to
C’mere to me now, so! and it all feels right and good.
The first time I felt fully assimilated was actually a non-verbal experience.
From the moment I arrived in Galway, I noticed how people here sometimes offered agreement by sucking a sharp intake of breath onto the roof of their mouths, loud enough to be heard, yet too soft to be spelled.
Far from that dreaded disapproving flared nostril sniff, this hissy breath is used to offer some kind of guiltily-agreed censure, such as when your friend offers:
“Oh he’s an awful man, so he is!”you respond with the inward hiss.
Gathering words and picking up accents are understandable but this sharp inward breath is a physical phenomenon, so I was shocked to find myself unthinkingly doing the intake response.
My time in Ireland has changed my breathing patterns. That’s a different level of assimilation altogether, so it is now.
Behave, Adley.
Be respectful.
And while we’re at it, while this Grumpy Old Colyoomist is on a roll, I can’t be doing with any TV or movies that describe themselves as any of the below.
Madcap. Romp. Cringe. Caper.
What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?
Nothing, but it felt so fine dumping it out of me and dropping it here.
Caper, indeed.
©Charlie Adley
09.05.2026
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