Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/68

CH. IV.] of him' ('Knocknagow'): ‘He was a descendant of Sir Thomas More that Henry VIII. cut his head off’ (whose head Henry VIII. cut off). The phrases above are incorrect English, as there is redundancy; but they, and others like them, could generally be made correct by the use of whose or of whom:—‘He looks like a man in whose pocket,’ &c.—‘A man whose wife leaves him.’ But the people in general do not make use of whose—in fact they do not know how to use it, except at the beginning of a question:—‘Whose knife is this?’ (Russell.) This is an excellent example of how a phrase may be good Irish but bad English.

A man possesses some prominent quality, such as generosity, for which his father was also distinguished, and we say ‘kind father for him,’ i.e. ‘He is of the same kind as his father—he took it from his father.’ So also ‘’Tis kind for the cat to drink milk’—‘cat after kind’—‘’Tis kind for John to be good and honourable’ [for his father or his people were so before him]. All this is from Irish, in which various words are used to express the idea of kind in this sense:—bu cheneulta do—bu dhual do—bu dhuthcha do.

Very anxious to do a thing: ‘’Twas all his trouble to do so and so’ (‘Collegians’): corresponding to the Irish:—‘Is é mo chúram uile,’ ‘He (or it) is all my care.’ (MacCurtin.)

Instead of ‘The box will hold all the parcels’ or ‘All the parcels will fit into the box,’ we in Ireland commonly say ‘All the parcels will go into the box.’ This is from a very old Gaelic usage, as may be seen from this quotation from the ‘Boroma’:—Coire mór uma í teigtís dá muic déc: ‘A large bronze caldron