“He’s a bleedin’ consequence, is what he is.” I’d never met this man, this consequence. I’d never heard the word used to describe a person. But I understood immediately and precisely what he was like. The story started in north Dublin, and I knew from the opening sentence that we are lucky the Hill of Howth is not now a crater in the Irish Sea due to the blunders of this man. I relished the obscurity of the word designated to him. Consequence - an effect, normally an unpleasant one. A lesser-used cousin of liability in this context.
Every now and then, one of these words, multi-tasking in its meanings, swirls around my ears and my head, and tickles me. Neuroscientific studies show that there is a pleasure centre in the brain that responds to words in a similar way to how it responds to music or visual beauty.
In reference to being reprimanded or overpowered, we tend to go for eating-related words. “She munched her out of the way,” someone said about an incident between two women working behind a bar. Munch – chewing vigorously, steadily, audibly. A Pac-Man figure appeared in my mind, the less dominant woman disappearing between chomps in front of the vodka bottles. My brothers-in-law in Tipperary often say, “Don’t ate me,” when they are being, let’s say, corrected, which always makes me smile.
When it comes to actually eating, words can really put you off your food. In a cafe recently, my friend complained of having an itchy back. My eyeballs nearly popped out of my head as he lifted a fork from the table and slid it down the inside of his T-shirt, giving himself a good scratch. I squealed in disgust and told him I would never be able to eat there again, knowing the skin-covered fork was in public circulation. “Think about it, Céire, there’s scaldy c**ts putting those forks in their mouths all the time, and then you’re eating off them after a light rinse.” I laughed for an hour.
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Scaldy – a young bird that has just fledged. I’d heard scaldy before, but it was the first time that it clicked with me, all the pink faces in the cafe, their open mouths, their tongues on the cutlery. He was right. My dad, a Derry man, would often say he was so hungry he could “eat a scabby headed wean”. Wean, shortened from wee-one/wee-un. Between the scabby and the scaldy, it’s hard to keep up an appetite.
Of course, I wouldn’t be one for condoning insults, but there are some wonderful words to capture someone who is hard work. The classic slurs have fast-pitched, percussive sounds, but I get a little dopamine hit out of soft consonants and open, flowing vowels when it comes to derogatory name-calling. Among my favourites are dose. Melt or melter feel good to say. Sap is pleasing on the tongue, maybe because you can elongate the s.
On the complimentary side, we use vigorous words like lash and cracker for someone good-looking. It took me a while to get my head around massive as praise. You or your hair being massive is a good thing. When it comes to being a good person, we use slow, heavy words like sound or dead on.
Your own history with a word can also impact the reaction you have to it. I grinned as I made out the word baps carefully scrawled down the side of a long slide in my local playground. I messaged my now 44-year-old friend to ask him whether he had been doing graffiti on Dublin’s southside recently, using one of his most prolific words of 1998 when he talked about cleavage, as 16-year-old boys tended to do then.
I wondered whether teenagers now use words of the same calibre as we did then. In conversation with my daughter, I ask after a fella she had shown interest in, but he’s a gonner. I turn to her pal and ask whether she has anyone on the go. “She does,” my daughter interrupts, “but he’s chopped.” The friend admits that, yes, he is a bit chopped. “That’s bad, right?” I confirm. “Yes,” they say, and we all giggle. Apparently he may not be the most handsome chap.
It is not just single-word portrayals that I find particularly amusing, but the evocative characterisation of people. My friend was a guest on a radio show, and a clip of her interview went up on the station’s social media. She was delighted with the coverage, but exasperated that someone had written under the link, “Jaysis, I’d say if you kicked a ball into her garden, she’d burst it.” It was hard to keep a straight face when she told me.
