Forget me not

Joe O'Connor on the Irish and their relationship with bad language. Click here to listen.

You know, one thing I’ve really noticed since returning to live in Ireland after five months working in America, is that we swear, we curse, we profane. Walk the streets of Dublin or any other Irish town and you’re likely to witness unusual climatic occurances as the air is turned blue by the perpetual hurricane of low-level but toe-curling Father Jackism. Curt, harsh words machine gun the land. Activities that would be impossible for anyone who is not a contortionist are recommended and name of the Bethlehem Baby is uttered so often that you’d swear we spent most of our time praying.

I’d like to give you some examples but of course I can’t because certain vivid words of an Anglo-Saxon nature cannot be repeated on a family programme, which is one of the reasons why Mr Paul Gogarty, TD, is not one of the Teletubbies, or at least currently. One of the most amusing hyprocracies of American television is that they don’t bleep out the offending focal dána when it appears in a movie, instead the overdub it so that the actor is heard to say the word "forget" in its place; his voice miraculously producing the innocent duo-syllablatic verb despite his lips being seen to move only once. As in “Go forget yourself buddy” or “I drank so much last night I got totally forgettin’ wasted” or again to return to the Kildare Street chuckle-factory “With all due respect, forget you Deputy Stagg, forget you”. For the purposes of this column, forget will have to do. Linguistic stand in. the star of the profanities subs bench,

One of the things revealed by the Paul Gogarty pre-Christmas outburst of goodwill to all men is our capacity to have our sensibilities inflamed, by a word. But given that we hear it nearly every day of the week in Ireland, it’s a wonder we’re not all perpetually crying. That forget word seems to have become a kind of emotional comma, a pausing for breath; a reminder that the speaker has not fallen asleep; a means of keeping the conversational taxi-meter still running when the vehicle isn’t actually going anywhere.

My grandmother used to have a number of handy stock phrases she used on these occasions like “God between us!” and “All harm”, “Merciful hour! That beats Banagher!” “Sure God is good” and my own personal favourite, that lovely phrase from the primordial Irish past “Stop the lights!”

I have very happy memories of one occasion when I used this phrase in a short story that was to be eventually published in France. And the French translator rang me up in a state of blissful wonderment saying, “What a beautiful sentence. Stop the lights. Is it from the works of William Butler Yeats?” I had to explain that it was actually from a 1970’s quiz show presented by a man named Bunny Carr. “Ah, Bunny Carr!” exclaimed the Frenchman quietly, “In my language he would be called Monsieur Lapin Voiture”

But back to this business of non-stop Irish swearing. In my view we can be a little prissy about this; since words are only words, the play things of the everyday and there are times when we need them to be salty as well as sweet - something we have always understood in Ireland. That said, my time in America had temporarily erased the memory of quite how non-stop Irish vulgarity is, to the extent that to reproduce in print many Irish conversations would result in such a plethora of censuring asterisks that the effect would be like looking at a map of the Milky Way.

Nothing had prepared me for the conversation that I overheard on my first day back in Dublin when one man in the pub turned to his newly arrived friend and happily exclaimed “Ah forget you, you fat forgetter! How are you forgettin’ keepin’? And how did you get over the forgettin’ Christmas?” To which the answer came back “It was fairly forgettin’ quiet, to be honest” At which point the former conversationalist came chiming back in “Forget me, I wish mine was quiet, it was non-stop noise with the forgettin’ kids and the forgettin’ dog and the forgettin’ mother-in-law; up on a visit from Borris-in-forgettin’-Ossary, she was laid on like the forgettin’ gas, she was the forgettin’ aul wonderly wagon.”

Well, the affairs of the nation were then gone over for a while “Sure the country is forgotten, them forgetters in Dáil, Fianna forgettin’ Fáil and Fine forgettin’ Gael. One shower of the the forgetters is as bad as the other and the Labour party don’t be talkin’ don’t get me started. Oh Jim Larkin is back in the saddle right enough and yer man the Greens is the biggest forgetter of all it’s no wonder the place is forgot. And the forgettin’ builders and the forgettin’ bankers down in their forgettin’ tent in the Galway forgettin’ Races and Bertie the forgettin’ king of them. Well we won’t be forgettin’ well forgettin’ them when it comes to the election, will we? We’ll be forgettin’ well rememberin’ them won’t we?”

It was like being in a wind tunnel of happy hearted profanity, when someone has switched the controls up to eleven, and it continued unabated for at least two hours until with a final fanfare of forgetfulness, they fecked off.

What does it mean? Are we linguistically lazy in Ireland? Given our mastery of the byways of the beautiful English language - a tongue that has a word for pretty much any situation imaginable, is it just that we cannot be bothered to learn? I used to know the answer but I’m not sure I remember it anymore. Yes, you might say, I’ve forgotten.

Joe O'Connor