Hi,
for what will almost certainly be the last missive of 2024.
As always when I'm back in Dublin from Berlin, the reverse culture shock is immense. People jaywalk with children in tow? I can't just say 'genau' when all other words fail me? (It is incredible the number of automatic genaus you have to stifle after too much time among Germans.)
Among other things, I miss DM, a drugstore chain I would analogise with the big Bootses in London. There are things DM stocks that Boots does not, and things Boots stocks that DM does not, but either of these will cover 80% of your waking needs. Dublin has neither. Our Bootses are narrower in focus, and there is no DM at all. Nowhere to print anything from your phone at 10c a sheet! Nowhere with the delicates detergent required to wash the 100% silk lingerie sets you bought in bulk at the Intimissimi sale a year ago! (I eventually found some Woolite in Dunnes. Christmas is saved.)
Of course there are Dublin things I've missed, too. One thing you have to accept, as a lived-in-many-countries person, is that each country is a package deal. The shops aren't as good in Dublin, but I can casually change the radio or TV channel and hear Gaeilge any time I want. Public transport is dire, but the city centre is eminently walkable. Irish small talk requirements can be taxing, but I like it that we give other people the time of day whether or not they're — in some miserly sense — useful to us. The indirectness of Irish communication can be perplexing to disentangle, but without its understated nuance we could never experience the astringent pleasure of lethally condemning some incompetent local politician as 'harmless enough'.
*
There was a terrible old Irish-American film playing on RTÉ. I don't remember its name, or have on some level chosen to repress it. One of the characters was canonically American; the rest were 'Irish', speaking with accents as improvised as they were chaotic.
There's not enough artistic integrity in such fumbling efforts to bother getting angry at them. (They're harmless enough.)
But watching this unholy mess — that is, catching the odd glimpse of it while texting anyone benevolent enough to distract me — illuminated something for me: the most common way that writers get dialects wrong is by disrespecting their internal consistency and rules. The screenwriters pilloried Irish English not only because they do not speak it, but because they couldn't apprehend that its features are structural in nature. You can't go around making up your own Irish English if you don't fundamentally understand its inner workings. They used 'yiz' to refer to one person, for instance, when the whole reason it's there in Irish English is to distinguish singular 'you' from plural. That's not to say all speakers of Irish English would explicitly articulate the difference in those terms, but it's not a mistake that any of them would make.
(In Irish, the difference is tú/sibh: interestingly, we're one of the few European languages that distinguishes 'you' along singular/plural lines, but never by level of formality. When anglophones were shifting from 'thou' to 'you', francophones from 'tu' to 'vous' etc. in the 17th century, the British had extinguished the former native Irish-speaking aristocracy; social differences within the remaining impoverished Irish-speaking world weren't marked enough to require a class-variegated form of address. English, of course, has circled back around to the same social flatness by giving everyone the 'you' nowadays.)
What I'm getting at is this: everything in Irish English is there for a reason, often reasons that predate English itself. Even the much-caricatured 'at all at all' repetition actually comes from the Irish 'ar chor ar bith', i.e. 'by any turn': it wound up getting translated into English in a way that prioritised rhythm above literal meaning. People were saying it in Irish before English was even a language. You don't have to know any of this history to use it accurately, but you do have to know that Irish English is not just an erratic collection of remixable leprechaun slogans.
Anyway, that was a terrible movie. I also rewatched Chicago, an unimprovable masterpiece. How mother was it of Catherine Zeta Jones to chew up the genre, spit out the feathers and then basically never do another musical again?
*
I hope Bulette, my beloved Berlin street cat, is having a good Christmas from his perch. For my part, I intend to do a lot of restorative yoga and wake up bendier in 2025.
Till next time,
N