Another video moment (commercial this time)

[dianeduane]

Possibly my favorite of the Amstel ads that have been airing for a while. (This one was shot in 16:9, so you may find it looking a little squeezed. Sorry about that.)

Before the Flood...

(A few dialogue / dialect notes: 

"I'm waitin' on yer man": "Yer man" used colloquially is "That fella/guy," "this/that person here/over there." Cf. the famous poem about "A pint of plain is your only man."

"It's lashing out there":  It's "lashing down rain":  pouring, coming down really hard.

"He's after forgettin' these yokes!"  "He's after...":  the idiom translates an Irish-language verb phrasing that with "forgetting" equals, in this case, "He forgot / he's just forgotten ..."  "Yoke" is Irish slang for some unnamed or unspecified object. The closest US translation would probably be "these guys".)

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Now that's interesting. I'm well familiar with the other expressions and even use the first two myself regularly, but I have never heard "yoke" in that context. I'm not Irish myself, but I was married to a half-Irish folk musician for thirteen years and regularly attended his gigs in the sort of pubs that were frequented by the local Irish community. If you've ever read any of the Brentford novels by Robert Rankin, you'll have a very clear picture of the sort of Irishman (and they almost all were men) that I used to associate with. :-)

So is "yoke" to be heard all over Ireland, or is it local to a particular area, do you happen to know?

[dduane.livejournal.com]

It's kind of sporadic, I'd guess. The Slanguage Irish-English slang dictionary lists it, but doesn't suggest anything regional: citations include a usage by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. So your guess would be as good as mine.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :-)

I haven't read that one. I ploughed through Ulysses with ferocious determination at the age of about 17 or 18, just so that I could understand why so many people spoke so highly of it, and after that marathon I never was able to face any Joyce again. It's possible I might like some of his other works, but after that experience I have never quite had the courage to go and find out.

"half-irish"

[(Anonymous)]

Given Diane's post from the 16th, and my own similar observations, I'm going to assume he didn't refer to himself that way. Especially not at this time of year.

Pete Newell (not bloody Irish at all, unless I've just been watching Father Ted)

Re: "half-irish"

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

He considered himself English when he wasn't in the pub and Irish when he was, more or less. :-) It's rather like one of my colleagues at work, who was born in Birmingham of Indian parents, got three Master's degrees, and is now doing his PhD. He is English to the core until I get him on the subject of cooking, at which point he instantly becomes Indian, which I think is just as it should be.

Re: "half-irish"

[(Anonymous)]

Gives the concept of situational ethnics a whole new meaning, doesn't it?

Re: "half-irish"

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Now that's delicious. :-D Please let me know if you ever get your own LJ, because I should like to add you!

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Having spent so much of my childhood in Ireland, I do often confuse the non-Irish with an occasional tendency to use some of the Irish constructs. I don't go quite as far as using things like 'Put that yoke in the press willya'.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Useful theatrical slang is "doobrie" which is almost equivalent to "yoke" but not quite, since a doobrie is something you'll find on a set (which, admittedly, can be pretty much anything so "put the doobrie on the wotsit which sits on the thingummy" isn't much use to anyone who hasn't been on set for a while...) but I've just checked with young G. and he says I've never used "yoke" to him, but I have occasionally used "doobrie" but on the whole I use "thingy" or "wotsit" to him, on the grounds that otherwise he just doesn't understand.

[ailbhe]

I first encountered "doobrie" in a tampons ad with only English accents, though it was on Irish radio.

Yoke and yokibus were part of my vocabulary unless talking to foreigners. I speak pretty good American and British English when necessary.

[sshi.livejournal.com]

Same here on the yokes, also yokie-ma-jig, however you may spell it. I wonder if it's a Dublin thing? It was one of the all-purpose words that we had fun teaching the foreign students when I was in college - I wandered into a conversation about the usefulness of the word 'thingy' one day and proceeded to do some vocabulary expansion.

Never heard of doobrie in my life...

[cill-ros.livejournal.com]

Yokibus! My mother uses that. That puts the kibosh (another Irishism) on my idea that 'yoke' was primarily Dublin in origin, because she's from Munster. Yokimibob is another one.

[lady-autumnstar.livejournal.com]

So I watched the "Flood" ad, then went on to "New World" and Troy". Somebody at the ad agency deserves a raise.

[owlmirror36.livejournal.com]

Since I was curious about Irish-English idioms, I searched a bit and tracked down this page (which mostly tends towards the purely vulgar)

  http://www.at.artslink.co.za/~gerry/print.htm

And also this, far more scholarly and thorough:

  http://www.hiberno-english.com/