An Updated Version of My Lesser-Known Irish Words and Phrases List

Whenever it comes to a discussion of Irish slang and idioms, it's always the same handful that come to mind; eejit, craic, bold, etc. But there's loads of others that are used all the time but that never really make it into such lists, since we're barely conscious of using them.

So every time I find myself using a lesser-known Irishism, or hear one, I add it to the list.

Today I found myself using the word "loola", meaning "lunatic", and added it to the list. I decided I might as well post the list with all the latest additions. I've put expressions in bold which occur pretty much on a daily basis. I'm confident in saying that the expressions in bold would be used thousands of times every day in Ireland.

Others are less common; most Irish people to whom I mentioned the expression "sent from Billy to Jack" had never heard it. Nevertheless, it is indeed used and it's only used in Ireland. Do an internet search if you don't believe me.

So here we go:

Youu’re some flower (You’re quite a character).

The biggest (or greatest) such-and-such that ever walked out (e.g., “The greatest liar that ever walked out”). Never used as a compliment.

Sent from Billy to Jack (Being sent from one person, department etc. to another). Quite rare.

You’re a star (Thank you).

Tell me this and tell me no more (Asked for emphasis before asking a question).

Get out of that garden (Stop messing about). Usually jocular.

You’re very good (Thank you).

You're some tulip (You’re quite a character). Rare.

At all at all (Used for emphasis).

Goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye (Ending phonecalls).

He's a total looper (He’s crazy).

You're some boy (You’re quite a character).

In the ha’penny place (Not as good as someone else).

No bother to you! (You could easily do that).

What is this I was going to say? (Said when you lose your train of thought. I've never heard any non-Irish people say this.)

In the name and honour of all that’s good and holy (For emphasis). Rare these days, or jocular.

Fussing and foostering (Fidgeting and behaving restlessly). I get the impression this one is quite archaic, although when I mentioned it to other Irish people, they'd heard it. I've only ever heard it from my mother, who died in 2001.

Moidered (Exhausted, harassed, pestered).

Hurler on the ditch (Someone who gives advice about something they don’t do themselves).

Pass remarkable (said of someone who makes snide comments, or just intrusive comments. "He's a very pass remarkable kind of guy"-- he's the kind of person who passes remarks.)

Mílemurder (pronounced meela-murder, a combination of Irish "míle", meaning thousand, and murder. Basically means 'blue murder', a hubbub, a commotion. One of my favourites.)

The Irish Gaelic phrase "rí-rá agus rúla-bula", pronounced ree-raw ogus roola-boola, and meaning uproar and commotion, is fairly often used in Hiberno-English. I think the constituent elements are used on their own more often, to mean the same thing. Indeed, I've never actually heard the whole phrase used, to my knowledge. Always used jocularly.

Loola (mad).

I will in my eye. (I absolutely will not. "I will in my eye pay to use the bathroom". Can also be used to express scepticism about something that somebody else supposedly did: "She did in her eye get up at six in the morning".)

An Attempt at an Aphorism

Humility smells great, but tastes terrible.

Footnote, which is going to be several times longer that the post: I'm personally not at all keen on artificial intelligence, so I was partly pleased and partly disconcerted at the AI-generated explanation which came up (unsolicited) when I googled this aphorism, to see if anyone else had said it before me. I was pleased because my aphorism obviously conveys what it's supposed to convey if AI understands it in a jiffy. Disconcerted because the advance of AI scares me, even though I realize it's not actually thinking. Anyway, this is what it said:

The phrase "humility smells great but tastes terrible" is a metaphor for a difficult truth or virtue that is admired but unpleasant to experience. Humility is seen as a great quality that makes one admirable, but the act of being truly humble can feel demeaning, especially when it involves acknowledging one's own limitations or being perceived as "too" humble, which can be harmful. The phrase uses a play on the senses to express this complex idea: while humility is a virtue that smells "good" (is a positive thing to have), putting that virtue into practice can have a negative "taste" (be an unpleasant experience).

Smells great: Humility is often described as a virtue, a positive quality that is respected and admired. It makes people seem better, more relatable, and easier to work with.

Tastes terrible: The experience of being humble can be difficult. It might involve acknowledging that you don't know everything, admitting you're wrong, or putting someone else's needs before your own. These actions can be uncomfortable and feel like a sacrifice, even if they are ultimately for the best.

The metaphor: The phrase draws a parallel between the abstract concept of humility and the physical experience of taste and smell. The smell (how others perceive it) is positive, but the taste (the internal, personal experience of it) is negative. This highlights the difference between an admired virtue and the personal cost of practicing it.

Habemus Cathedral!

Dublin has an official cathedral for the first time since the Reformation!

I wrote this about the (formerly) Pro-Cathedral in a fairly recent post, "The Atmosphere of Dublin":

Another strange one-- the Pro-Cathedral seems quintessentially Dublin to me. I hated it as a child. My father used to take my brother and me into it to light a candle every now and again (probably not more than five times in all). It seemed dark, musty, reminiscent of death and mortality, haphazardly laid-out, and ramshackle. Now, of course, all these things appeal to me.

Presumably people will still call it "the Pro-Cathedral". I'll be disappointed if they don't!

Bliss

I've been contemplating this post for a good while. But I've put off writing it, both because it's about something that's very important to me and because it's something that's very hard to put into words.

For many years, I've been aware of a contradiction in my own personality. Temperamentally I'm a pessimist, but philosophically (for want of a better word) I'm an optimist.

When it comes to my own life and experiences, I nearly always expect to be disappointed. I nearly always anticipate that things won't work. This extends to very mundane things. If I make a joke and somebody laughs, I'm both delighted and amazed. (People who have heard my jokes will probably say this is entirely justified.)

But it extends to bigger things, as well. Don't ask me who's going to win the next big election or referendum that we all care about. My answer is always: "The side that I'd like to see lose."

Similarly, the current indications of a revival of Christianity flabbergast me. I didn't expect to see this in my lifetime.

So I'm a pessimist by nature. And yet I've never been attracted to philosophical (or artistic) pessimism.

I've generally been drawn to optimistic art and entertainment. For instance, Star Trek, which is not only optimistic but downright utopian. Or Groundhog Day, which is all about a cynical jerk learning to appreciate the beauty of everyday and ordinary. Or the US version of The Office, which is deeply sentimental and upbeat under its upper layer of cringe comedy. Or the "Fanfare for the Makers" section from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal.

(Not that I never like pessimistic entertainment. But I like it as an astringent cordial.)

The last day of the twentieth century was a big day for me, because I won a millennium poetry competition organized by ITV Teletext. My poem drew on Lord Alfred Tennyson's famous "New Year's bells" section from In Memoriam-- "Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring out the thousand years of peace"-- and contrasted it with the horrors of the twentieth century. But it ended on a defiantly hopeful note:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky--
Though every hope may be disproved
May none see through such jaundiced eye
As to regard this night unmoved--

Although so many a New Year peal
Brought forth so many a hope untrue
Still whisper with unvanquished zeal
Ring out the old, ring in the new;

Ring in the new, ring out the old;
For who can say that hopes are vain?
And if they fail a thousandfold
May others hope them all again.

So I'm a pessimist by nature but an optimist by choice.

In some ways, being a thoroughgoing pessimist leads to an optimistic view of the world-- or, at least, a relatively approving view of the world. Things are never quite as bad as a pessimist expects (most of the time). If you are not currently living through war, famine, plague, or anarchy-- well, things could be much worse.

(There's an amusing illustration of this in a Tom Sharpe novel-- one of the WIlt novels, though I forget which one. Wilt describes Lord of the Flies as a sickeningly sentimental novel, since the author actually seems surprised and outraged that an island of schoolboys would descend to barbarity!)

But this route to optimism from pessimism isn't just a reaction to circumstances, at least in my case. It's a reaction to the underlying conditions of existence. For instance, I've often found myself feeling grateful for the fact that most of us, most of the time, confidently expect to live another day and another year. I can imagine a world where this wasn't the case, not just in times of war or sickness but in times of peace and health. What if all human life was literally as precarious as a war-zone?

The poetry of Louis MacNeice nourished (and expressed) this sense of pessimistic optimism, or pessimistic gratitude. But don't worry, I'm not going to divert into MacNeice just now.

As you can imagine, the discovery of G.K. Chesterton in my late twenties was an epoch in my life. Principally because Chesterton carried me over the finish line of faith in Christianity, but also because he vindicated and amplified this innate sense of gratitude and wonder, under all my pessimism.

Out of dozens of possible Chesterton passages I could quote, the "abyss of light" passage from Chaucer might be the best: "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude."

Al of this, however, is a sort of prologue to what I really wanted to write.

I really wanted to write about bliss-- an underlying sense of bliss which has accompanied me all my life, as far as I can remember. Even in the shadow of my general pessimism and melancholy.

More than anything else, this bliss resembles a faint music which can just about be heard, or which comes in and out of hearing, and which underlies everything.

When I look back at my infancy and childhood, I remember a lot of boredom and frustration and other negative emotions-- but all the time, shot through with the sense of bliss underlying everything.

This sense of bliss seems like both an underlying reality and an anticipation, an anticipation of something unspeakably wonderful which throws every other joy and happiness into the shade.

I'm sure this is a common human feeling, even among atheists and secularists-- hence the many social philosophies that beckon us towards a heaven on earth, or which "immanentize the eschaton". Of course, for religious believers, it's a premonition of Heaven, or the Beatific Vision, or some equivalent. In the words of Tennyson, it's:

That far-off, divine event

To which the whole creation moves.

I'm sure that almost all of my readers are thinking of C.S. Lewis and "Joy" right now-- as well they might. There's an obvious resemblance between the "bliss" I'm describing here and the Joy that Lewis has described so well. If there's a difference, it might be that Joy seemed to be a fairly rare experience for Lewis, while the "bliss" I'm describing is more habitual. (I might be wrong about that.) I'll come back to Lewis and Joy later.

Where Lewis had his Joy, Wordsworth had his "spots of time". I'm not saying all these experiences are the same, they certainly resemble each other.

(Honest to God, I didn't use the term "bliss" to differentiate it from Lewis's "Joy". I wasn't even thinking of the Lewis comparison when I started writing this post!)

If this sense of bliss was all anticipation, it might be seen as a curse-- a sort of evolutionary carrot on a string to keep us soldering on through the hardships of life.

But it's not just that. It's as much a bliss in things as they are as it is looking forward to some future happiness. In fact, both seem linked to me: every moment of bliss seems like a beacon towards some ultimate bliss.

C.S. Lewis, in a famous passage that is always worth quoting, lists a few triggers (if I dare use that word?) of Joy: "the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves."

I have my own list of triggers when it comes to bliss:

The titles of various films, books, albums, etc. For instance, The Road to Wigan Pier or Mornings in the Dark or "There is a Light That Never Goes Out".

Particular words and phrases. ("The dead of night", "The middle of nowhere", "The old, old story..")

The hum of voices on the air, especially in a place in which a current of life is always passing through: a hotel lobby, an airport concourse, etc.. Or the hum of voices in the air at a special event such as an election count centre, a conference, a convention, an open day, or so forth.

Anything to do with the iconography, symbolism, and associations of the cinema; the stylized image of a reel of celluloid, an old-fashioned cinema marquee, a TV presenter addressing the camera in an empty cinema, studio logos, and so on.

Every stylized symbol that is used to evoke a whole atmosphere; such as a lit cityscape at night for the Big City, or a cartoon palm tree for reggae music, or a glitterball for the seventies.

The sounds that water-pipes make; tapping, the whistling of wind, gurgling, and so forth. Along with many other sounds.

Anything that evokes "the drunkenness of things being various", as Louis MacNeice so memorably put it. For instance, the Trivial Pursuit board.

Anything that evokes a tradition; a Halloween bonfire, a Chrismas tree, an Advent wreath, a menorah, etc.

Various idents, such as this one, and this one, (The Carlton one brings back happy memories of my peak cinema-going days, in my early twenties.)

I could go on and on. Indeed, I doubt I'll resist the temptation of adding to this list in the future.

But you get the picture, and I may as well end it there. I hope I have explained, to some extent at least, how I can regard myself as a melancholy pessimist who still exults in the gift of life, the magic of existence itself.

Strangely Unexploited Story Ideas

Another quick post. (I'm working on something else, and, as ever, my mind is popping all over the place.)

I was a keen reader of the UK comic Eagle in the nineties. The most famous serial in Eagle was "Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future". But by the time I came to it, the comic had absorbed any number of other comics, as was the custom in the British comic industry. (When one comic went out of business, its more successful serials migrated to another comic.) So Eagle was a curious mixture of science-fiction, horror, war, and humour.

One less-celebrated serial in Eagle was "Toys of Doom", about a rather unlikeable boy who had an army of mechanical toys who followed his commands. He operated them by remote control. He'd inherited them from a relative, I think. The story itself was a spin-off from a previous serial, as I've learned recently (but didn't know at the time).

I remember I loved "Toys of Doom". I appreciated that its central character was a not particularly sympathetic kid, which is how I felt myself to be at the time (and I was largely right). But I also liked it because it had a premise so full of potential. I can't remember any plot details, but I remember turning to it with pleasure and anticipation every week. 

Here's the thing: it's a great premise for a story. And yet, I can't remember ever encountering a similar story, despite the number of other plot-lines that are regurgitated!

Interesting Survey of Priorities from American Priests

A very quick post..

The 2025 National Survey of Catholic Priests (in the USA) was recently released, based on answers from 1,165 priests. It can be read here.

The graph displaying these priests' pastoral priorities, on page fifteen, makes for very interesting reading.

The top three priorities (in order, and out of fifteen) are: youth and young adult ministry, family formation/marriage preparation, and evangelization.

The bottom three (again in order) are: synodality, LGBTQ community, and access to the Traditional Mass.

If it's reliable, it's a snapshot that complicates both liberal and conservative narratives.

The Fallacy of the Leftist and the Libertarian

 It seems to me that leftists and libertarians both operate from wrong assumptions.

The leftist assumes that the totality of wealth is a big cake that's just there and can be divided up by government. (This isn't literally what they believe, but it's pretty much this.)

The libertarian, for his part, has the opposite belief (again, not literally, but pretty much): that all the wealth in society is created by individuals from their own efforts, ignoring how much everybody owes to infrastructure, civil peace, natural environment, the virtues that have been inculcated by churches and traditional families, and so on. (When I said this on Facebook, once, I was accused of echoing Obama's slogan that "You didn't build that". Well, I think he was right about that much.)