Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/209

 194 Anything that cheers you up 'takes the cockles off your heart': 'Here drink this [glass of punch, wine, &c.] and 'twill take the cockles off your heart.' 'It raises the very cockles o' my heart to see you.' ('Collegians.') ‘’Twould rise the cockles av your heart to hear her singing the Coolin.’ (‘Knocknagow.’) Probably the origin is this:—Cares and troubles clog the heart as cockles clog a ship.

Instead of ‘No blame to you’ or ‘Small blame to you,’ the people often say, ‘’Tis a stepmother would blame you.’

'Cut your stick, now,' 'cut away'; both mean go away: the idea being that you want a walking stick and that it is time for you to cut it.

‘I hear William is out of his situation.’ ‘Yes indeed, that is true.’ ‘And how is he living?’ ‘I don't know; I suppose he's living on the fat of his guts’: meaning he is living on whatever he has saved. But it is sometimes used in the direct sense. Poor old Hill, while his shop prospered, had an immense paunch, but he became poor and had to live on poor food and little of it, so that the belly got flat; and the people used to say—he's living now on the fat of his guts, poor old fellow.

Tom Hogan is managing his farm in a way likely to bring him to poverty, and Phil Lahy says to him—'Tom, you'll scratch a beggarman's back yet': meaning that Tom will himself be the beggarman. ('Knocknagow.') Common all over Munster.

The people have a gentle laudable habit of mixing up sacred names and pious phrases with their ordinary conversation, in a purely reverential spirit. This is one of the many peculiarities of Anglo-Irish