Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/46

CH. IV.] gives it the form of ‘What is on you?’ (Ulster), which is exactly the English of Cad é sin ort?

A visitor stands up to go. ‘What hurry is on you?’ A mild invitation to stay on (Armagh). In the South, ‘What hurry are you in?’

She had a nose on her, i.e. looked sour, out of humour (‘Knocknagow’). Much used in the South. ‘They never asked me had I a mouth on me’: universally understood and often used in Ireland, and meaning ‘they never offered me anything to eat or drink.’

I find Mark Twain using the same idiom:—[an old horse] ‘had a neck on him like a bowsprit’ (‘Innocents Abroad’); but here I think Mark shows a touch of the Gaelic brush, wherever he got it.

‘I tried to knock another shilling out of him, but all in vain’: i.e. I tried to persuade him to give me another shilling. This is very common with Irish-English speakers, and is a word for word translation of the equally common Irish phrase bain sgilling eile as. (Russell.)

‘I came against you’ (more usually agin you) means ‘I opposed you and defeated your schemes.’ This is merely a translation of an Irish phrase, in which the preposition le or re is used in the sense of against or in opposition to: do tháinic me leat annsin. (S. H. O'Grady.) ‘His sore knee came against him during the walk.’

Against is used by us in another sense—that of meeting: ‘he went against his father,’ i.e. he went to meet his father [who was coming home from town]. This, which is quite common, is, I think, pure