In the mid-19th century, almost half of the immigrants coming into America were from Ireland. Today, people with Irish ancestry make up almost 10% of the current U.S. population. While the history of this population swell isn’t all pretty stories, the contributions of Irish people to American culture are vast. Let’s learn some Irish slang so you can be prepared to celebrate next St. Patrick’s Day.
In American English, “sham” means “something that is bogus or false.” Not so in Ireland. There, this word means “friend,” and it’s used primarily in the Ballymoney, Coleraine, and Portrush areas. “Sham” may come from the Ulster-Scots dialect, spoken mostly in Northern Ireland.
If an Irish person calls you a “muppet,” they think you’re quite silly. This word can also be used in a more gentle way to describe “someone enthusiastic but inept; a person prone to mishaps through naivety.”
If something is banjaxed in Ireland, it’s broken or damaged. The origin of this adjective is unclear, but it’s primarily used in Dublin and was first recorded in 1939 in Brian O’Nolan’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds (which he published under the name Flann O’Brien): “Here is his black heart sitting there as large as life in the middle of the pulp of his banjaxed corpse.”
This expression, meaning “to wait or hold on a moment,” is used primarily in Northern Ireland. You might hear the Derry girls use it on the popular Netflix comedy series about life in Northern Ireland in the 1990s.
“Yoke” can refer to anything (or less commonly, a person) with a name one does not recall, know, or wish to specify. Consider it the Irish equivalent of “thingamajig.” The Oxford English Dictionary notes its first recorded use in P.W. Joyce’s English as We Speak It (1910): “Yoke; any article, contrivance, or apparatus, for use in some work.” There’s an additional 2005 citation showing that the slang term has kept its meaning almost 100 years later: “Sure he went to Belfast for that yoke the minute he saw one on television for fear we haven’t enough clutter.”
While this began as an American and Australian slang word, it has been adopted for use mainly by the Irish. It paradoxically means something is great or fantastic.
“Gatch” is the Irish equivalent of “gait,” but it describes a distinctive way a person walks — specifically a flashy kind of swagger.
