{"id":144033,"date":"2025-10-25T04:34:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T04:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/144033\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T04:34:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T04:34:10","slug":"colm-oregan-on-the-nature-of-gallivanting-with-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/144033\/","title":{"rendered":"Colm O’Regan on the nature of Gallivanting with Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comedian, author, and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O\u2019Regan\u2019s latest project is a love letter to the way we speak.<\/p>\n

Not just the grand turns of phrase, but the small, local miracles that vanish along with the last person we remember saying them.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a moment, early in our chat, when the Cork man parks the jokes and talks like a man with serious work to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been doing this for a hundred thousand years,\u201d he says, meaning language, meaning the everyday miracle of saying and being understood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much locked away in how we speak \u2014 in accents, in the little words we don\u2019t even notice we\u2019re using.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says it softly, but Gallivanting with Words is, at heart, an act of salvage, of quiet rebellion.<\/p>\n

The book is part almanac, part family album, part wink-and-elbow to the ribs of a nation: write it down before it\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s done versions of this before \u2014 the Irish Mammies phenomenon, those pithy 140-character gospels from early Twitter days, the fiction that grew out of a Farmers Journal column and a woman named Ann Devine who arrived on the page talking the way real people talk.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But this time the project is explicit.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to fuse three things,\u201d he says. \u201cThe nerdy fascination; the reverence \u2014 because this stuff matters; and the funny, because if it isn\u2019t memorable it won\u2019t stick.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Regan\u2019s reverence is mongrel and practical. He has gone down linguistic rabbit holes \u2014 \u201cproper science\u201d, he insists, with interviews, corpora, frequency analysis \u2014 and come back blinking with respect for anyone who maps how words come in and out of use.<\/p>\n

He grins: \u201cIt gave me a new humility. People think linguists are making it up. They\u2019re not. They\u2019re listening.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s listening too. To old Dublin via Give Up Yer Aul Sins, to the almost-vanished \u201cright you be\u201d, to country imperatives smuggled from Irish into Hiberno-English \u2014 \u201clet you go to bed now\u201d \u2014 phrases we inherit without noticing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the thing,\u201d he says. \u201cA lot of it disappears when people die.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Regan wants the living to fight that drift in small, domestic ways. He imagines the breakfast table as an archive.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour father\u2019s favourite word isn\u2019t in this book,\u201d he writes, almost daring you to be offended. \u201cGrand. Write it down.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has an image he leans on: the Norwegian seed vault; two mountain doors opening onto shelves of quiet rescue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial media isn\u2019t an archive,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s one power surge away from a blackout. A notebook is an archive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ColmColm O’Regan in the Museum of Literature Ireland, moli.ie. Picture: Nina Val, @nvksocial<\/p>\n

SMALL COUNTRY, BIG MEMORY<\/p>\n

If the book has an origin myth, it\u2019s something like this: small country, big memory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are islanders, he argues, and islands are self-conscious by necessity. We know the shape of Idaho better than Idaho knows we exist.<\/p>\n

We look at ourselves in public. We take the piss out of ourselves in private.<\/p>\n

We overstate our understatement. We wear our dialect like the good trousers for visitors (\u201cmy father\u2019s accent got stronger if the guests were from abroad,\u201d he laughs).<\/p>\n

I recall one of the first times a phrase wrong-footed me: a petrol-station in Donegal, 19 and green, the shop girl asking \u201care you getting?\u201d \u2014 a plain local kindness that sounded, to a Mayo ear, like a riddle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Later, social media would do a similar trick to the country: all those tiny, unprintable words suddenly typed and shared.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore, you\u2019d never write \u2018ara\u2019,\u201d he says. \u201cNow you see ara, d\u2019jever, yerra in comment threads. We\u2019re transcribing our mouths.\u201d<\/p>\n

He loves this new evidence while worrying about its fragility. \u201cIt\u2019s being recorded in an impermanent way,\u201d he says. \u201cSo let\u2019s help the proper archivists. Let\u2019s write.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Regan is careful with certainty. He likes origins but doesn\u2019t fetishise them, and he wants the reader to push back when a tidy story feels too tidy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Take \u201clatchico\u201d \u2014 is it a bull with one testicle, as John B Keane once quipped? A satchel-rooted insult? A mutated latch-key from the eviction years?<\/p>\n

O\u2019Regan will present the lot and mark his own theories as such, which is part good manners and part ethic: \u201cHistory matters. Don\u2019t make it up. Or if you must, label it nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n

A BOOK OF LABELS<\/p>\n

\n Gallivanting with Words is a book of labels and unlabelled jars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You open one and there\u2019s a case study of pure Hiberno-English, a road rage row in Irish where a van driver grammatically aspirates the c-word and hurls it across a windscreen like a hand-thrown brick.<\/p>\n

You open another and there\u2019s Shelta seeping into the city\u2014 sham, feen, pure \u2014 or the way Cork teenagers could once change your blood type with a single \u201clike\u201d at the end of a sentence.<\/p>\n

He loves the original Hardy Bucks because they sound like the place, not the stereotype. He loves when a child on The Late Late Toy Show tells a yarn like an old storyteller and nobody smirks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve never been more culturally aware, and never less inclined to hide it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he admires the quiet graft behind the romance: D\u00fachas collectors with cold hands filling notebooks; Wexford\u2019s Michael Fortune gathering snippets on a shoestring; the stubborn online librarians who open a free door to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) if you only ask.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s bashful about the research \u2014 \u201ca lot of it is just knowing what to look for online\u201d \u2014 but there\u2019s hundreds of hours in this thing, even if he wears them lightly.<\/p>\n

The lightness matters because O\u2019Regan\u2019s humour works like a public service. \u201cLaughing is collective,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re 20 times more likely to laugh with someone than on your own. If there\u2019s a function to what I do \u2014 in comedy, in columns, in this book \u2014 it\u2019s giving people that small, shared surprise: Someone else noticed that. In a polarised world, I can\u2019t fix anything. But I can give people a few good minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s instinctively gentle \u2014 the opposite of the comic who needs a face to verbally smite. Even when the topic invites piety (climate change, say, in his earlier work) he looks for the common grin first.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a craft choice and a temperament. \u201cIt\u2019s exhausting to be negatively funny,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d be worried about people taking it up wrong. So I look for overlaps. The joy of language is an overlap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes the overlaps are glorious accidents. Hiberno-English and African American Vernacular English both love the word \u201cshook\u201d as a way of describing a state of mild discombobulation. We could spend another hour on this alone. That\u2019s the beauty of this linguistic beast.<\/p>\n

He loves how fiction shows its working too. When his first novel grew out of the Farmers Journal and became Ann Devine on the page, it was the dialogue he trusted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI love writing dialogue. The fun is in getting it right,\u201d he says. \u201cIrish audiences know when you\u2019re faking it. It\u2019s like that shot in The Snapper where Dessie drives to the Rotunda taking the worst possible route. Only a Dubliner notices, but once you notice you can\u2019t unsee it. Same with the ear. You don\u2019t have to capture every localism, but at least don\u2019t put words in a mouth that your mouth would never use.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ColmColm O’Regan in the Museum of Literature Ireland, moli.ie. Picture: Nina Val, @nvksocial<\/p>\n

A MOOD BOARD FOR THE COUNTRY<\/p>\n

For\u00a0all the scholarship and sentiment, Gallivanting with Words isn\u2019t a dictionary and doesn\u2019t want to be. It\u2019s a mood board for a country\u2019s sound.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It begins with a brisk gallop through our linguistic inheritance (no humble claim, he grins: \u201cThe utter hubris of me trying to do Ireland\u2019s linguistic history in the first five pages\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n

It tours the counties with affection and modesty, sometimes inventing a map where none exists simply to provoke the reader in Carlow or Clare into shouting back: \u201cThat\u2019s not our word \u2014 this is our word.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It admires the old Irish running under the English like groundwater; it argues, gently, that speaking a little Irish might, counter-intuitively, be the best way to preserve the English we actually speak.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much rigour, too, disguised as play. He will happily disappear for an evening into the OED, tracing a usage through the centuries like a detective; he will just as happily email a novelist to ask if a pet word truly appeared in a book or did he Mandela-effect it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He delights in the punk archaeology of etymology \u2014 the way Tayto is a toddler\u2019s misfire made empire; the way Reddit can sometimes draw a blank that teaches you more than an answer would.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s that small-country self-awareness again \u2014 our complicating modesty, our habit of playing ourselves down while getting the language up for visitors like a good suit. O\u2019Regan doesn\u2019t scold it. He simply notices the <\/p>\n

usefulness: \u201cWe\u2019re an island. We look at ourselves. We export ourselves. We talk about ourselves. And we keep talking because the counties still have identities. More words per square yard.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you sense a series in it \u2014 a podcast that ambles from parish to parish collecting sound the way The Rest Is History collects obscure emperors \u2014 you\u2019re not wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He laughs, happily imagining \u2018The Rest Is Language\u2019. The ideas are already simmering with the other pots: the climate work he keeps tipping away at; a half-dreamed popular maths book.<\/p>\n

Talking about the book, he says, is how he discovers what the book actually is. \u201cWhen you\u2019re writing, you\u2019re caught up in accuracy and structure,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re talking, you remember the joy that sent you there. That\u2019s the why.\u201d<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a beating heart to the enterprise, it\u2019s a small grief and a small hope. The grief is simple: people die and the way they said now dies with them. The hope is stubborn: someone, somewhere, decides not to let it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s that thing about dying twice,\u201d O\u2019Regan says. \u201cI think there\u2019s a third time: when the way you spoke no longer exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wrote this book to push that day back \u2014 for the quips of our forefathers, for yours, for the shop girl who once asked a blow-in \u201care you getting?\u201d and teaches, on an ordinary afternoon, that a sentence is a map of a place.<\/p>\n

At the end, he returns to the breakfast table and the battered copybook. \u201cI want the 84-year-old to read it and say, \u2018he\u2019s wrong \u2014 we said this,\u2019 and then write this down,\u201d he smiles. \u201cLet the archive argue with itself. That\u2019s how you keep a language alive. Not with piety. With use.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Gallivanting with Words is a brilliantly funny, companionable book, but it\u2019s also a small act of citizenship. It asks for five minutes of your day and a pencil.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It believes in your mouth and your memory. And if the cloud goes dark tomorrow, it wants the next child to find, on a shelf, a word we saved.<\/p>\n