The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #70760 Message #1210259
Posted By: John in Brisbane
19-Jun-04 - 12:16 AM
Thread Name: Pronunciation of Irish language
Subject: RE: Pronunciation of Irish language
Maybe slightly off topic, but was listening yesterday on Radio National to an Irish lady who works in the English Faculty at University of Adelaide.
Her main theme was how old Irish words have become part of Australian slang and were often used initially as secret words. The most interesting assertion was that the word 'didgeridoo' was the concatenation of two Irish words meaning 'black man' and 'trumpet'. While she did give the original words I have no idea what they were.
The segment was not long but the other slang she mentioned was 'kip' - the flat piece of wood used to toss pennies in the air in the gambling game of Two Up, 'cracking on' as in attempting to seduce (but not derived from 'craic'), and notably 'sheila' which in the earliest days of colonial Australia (when men outnumbered women nine to one) was an Irish word for homosexual - pronounced 'shayla' in those times. For those that don't know 'sheila' was a condescending term for a woman and largely supplanted by American terms such as 'chick'.
Regards, John