Put A Little Irish in Your English

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary just added some more words from Irish English, and some of them should be in your vocabulary, too, if you don’t know them already.

One of my favorites is segotia, S-E-G-O-T-I-A, segotia. And, Grant, do you know what that word means?

I do. I included an entry for that in one of my books, the Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. Yeah, I didn’t, of course, take it back as far as its full history, but yeah, it just means a friend. It’s a term of endearment.

Right, right. You’re my old segotia. We don’t know the etymology for sure. Some people have guessed that it comes from French meaning my dear child or maybe Irish shugutcha, which means here you are, but nobody knows for sure. What else was in there? What other Irish words do they include?

Well, my other new favorite word is kitug. That’s C-I-O-T-O with an accent mark G. C-I-O-T-O accent mark G. Kitug means somebody who’s left-handed. And it used to be a little bit more negative, but now it’s sort of ameliorated over the years. I think it means more like lefty. You know, my wife’s a kitug, bless her.

Well, you know, in my dictionaries, and I have a ton of reference works here, as you can imagine, there have been a number of different collections of words for left-handed in Ireland. And one of my favorite ones is clabberclawed.

My goodness, clabberclawed. That means left-handed?

Left-handed, yeah. Clabberclawed. I don’t know that it’s used anymore, but it was recorded.

Well, we’ll talk about another Irish word or two later in the show. We know we’ve got listeners all over the world. We know people speak a wide variety of Englishes. There’s more than just one, and there always has been.

And we’d love to hear about your variety of English, wherever you are and however you speak it.

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