Poetic jive lionised in Norn Iron lives

OUT OF MY HEAD - BOB IRVINE

OPINION: 'Know what I'm goin' to tell you. That woman's tripping over herself with conceit. She could'ne pass a shap window without waving at herself."

The Northern Irish have a way of speaking that is cockeyed poetry. We might call a kid scrawny, but to Ulster residents, he wouldn't have "as much fat on him as would oil a pair of spec hinges".

A male acquaintance might sport "a face like a well-kept grave", and as for the woman living at No29, "you could drink her bathwater, so you could".

Irish writer John Pepper captured this unique dialect in columns he kept going in The Belfast Telegraph for years.

They were compiled into booklets, and my mother had half a dozen. The last of them has just trickled through to me as her estate is wound up.

One Telegraph reader reported a neighbour "running as souple as a hare after the coalman", but an inhospitable housewife might never live down the shame if she offered a cup of tea and nothing to eat:

"She never even asked me had I a mouth on me. I was left standing with my two arms the one length."

That was one of my mother's favourite sayings when we were kids. I never made sense of many of them until my wife and I lived and worked in Northern Ireland for a year in the 1980s, getting to know distant whanau, as the Kiwi offspring of migrants do.

Half-schooled as I was, the "Norn Iron" dialect proved a struggle.

I quickly had to "catch myself on" and learn that weather wasn't bad, it was "desperate". You might be "ringin" (wet) if caught without a raincoat, but your feet would be dry if you thought to wear "mutton dummies".

On the rare occasion that the sun appeared, it was a "brave day" – so you pulled the curtains to avoid fading the carpet.

(The local wisdom is to "ne'er cast a clout 'til May is out". But, hailing from warmer climes, I didn't cast my clouts, or discard my warm clothing, all summer.)

A "bake" is your face, "quare" is very good – or very bad, depending on context – and "the broo" is the dole, truncated from the Labour Bureau.

Once you master the pronunciation – "haun" for hand, and siblings are "browers and sosters" – you are then equipped to mangle all these elements into phrases that would confound the best linguists.

Telegraph readers supplied John with a rich store:

"He was a brave wee man with a heart of corn."

"I'm not much of a cook but I could throw you up something."

"That woman's head's full of sweetie mice."

"He reminds me of a fella that would lift a feather with a duck at the end of it." (Not a compliment, I gather.)

"I never like to telefoam him, for he's awful hard to lift."

"I'm after a pair of sunglasses for my head's jumpin'."

"I have a cowl [cold] in my stomach but the weather wasn't too bad, so I thought I'd take myself out to break myself in."

However, if you "took bad" and were "under the doctor", you wouldn't complain if he had "hands like a feather duster".

Most of the population appeared to be "under the doctor" for their nerves when we were there during The Troubles, or as a consequence of "the pan" – a diet of heart-clogging fry-ups: barm brack, potato bread, soda farls, banana and bacon. A robust eater was "never behind the door when there's a good pan".

At a reception after one funeral, the widow remarked: "If only our Hughie had waited, he could have had a cup of tea with us, so he could. He was a quare man for a toasted scone."

Another wailing widow was pulled up short: "For goodness sake, Maggie, quit your girnin'. Sure, you won't be long after him."

Some of the expressions are beyond translation, but you get the drift.

"I wouldn't go back into that shap. All they do is wipe your eye."

And my favourite: "I don't like the way young Sam's corduroys whostle, and the way Rachel's behine moves when she walks; you'd think she was chewin' caramels."

Mum also kept old music books of Belfast songs that exhibit the same mischievous humour.

The Ballad of William Bloat, for instance, is a gruesome ditty about a Shankill Rd man with "a wife, the curse of his life, who continually got on his goat".

So much so that one day "he cut her bloody throat". Stricken with "a sudden awe of the angry law", William decides to take his own life. He drags the sheet from under his wife's "cowl feet" and hangs himself. (Not exactly a Burt Bacharach-Hal David lyric, then.)

The ballad ends: "But the strangest turn to the whole concern/Is only just beginning/He went to hell but his wife got well/And she's still alive and sinning/For the razor blade was German-made/But the sheet was Belfast linen."

We can safely say the Germans had the last laugh with that one.

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