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?

[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.

[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/