14 English words students learn differently if their teacher is American vs. British

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Working with an #acting #coaching client on an accent with material that lands so differently when more vowel substitutions are included. The entire feel of who their character is shifted. So cool to hear and see them explore those options.

#ActingCoach #ActingCoaching #accents #dialects #voiceover

Plámás

‘Don’t mind his plámásing.’

I heard someone say this on the Promenade in Salthill recently. It means: ‘Pay no attention to his flattery.’ Don’t and mind were merged, so the phrase sounded like /do:’maɪndɪz ’plɔ:mɔ:sən/.

Plámás /’plɔ:mɔ:s/ [‘plaw-mawse’] is an Irish noun and verb used in Hiberno-English; it means empty flattery, ingratiating talk, disingenuous praise. I’ve seen it anglicised as plaumause, plamause, and plawmass, or simply by dropping the accents.

It’s a word familiar to me since childhood, but I hear it only occasionally. A plámáser or plámásaí /’plɔ:mɔ:si:/ is a person engaging in plámás, while plámásach /’plɔ:mɔ:səx/ (‘flattering’) is the adjectival form. Here are some examples of its use.

Christopher Nolan, in The Banyan Tree:

now his big plámásing smile was back on

Eamonn Sweeney, Waiting for the Healer:

At midday, the inspector arrives. He is tall and thin and has the air of a true bureaucrat. Da tries to plámás him with coffee and some teacake I bought in the local shop.

A photo caption on a travel blog:

Eoghan plamasing the local women to get a cup of butter tea…

The Laois Nationalist:

On her re election as assistant treasurer Evelyn Dunne had words of support from her chairman Dick Miller: ‘She wont go out of her way to plaumause you or endear herself to you but I guarantee you she does the work.’

The blog Hunter S. Thompson Books:

Hunter S. Thompson a friend of the Mitchell brothers drifts in and out of this story. Reading it I can imagine him bounding around with his usual bow-legged gait, doing what he did best – plamasing everyone in sight, looking like he owned the place.

A quip on the IrishDogs community forum, in response to someone looking for a lift for a dog:

yeah plamause your way in there ;-)

A comment at the Irish Left Review:

Instead of the usual plamasach self-pitying oul’ guff which passes for analysis on the Irish Left…

A comment at Indymedia Ireland:

Concealing your argument with vague allusions and references without ever clarifying your point might impress and plaumause those already on your side, but it will only alienate everybody else.

Tom Mac Intyre in The Charollais, cited in Bernard Share’s Slanguage:

‘We are, in no sense, boasting.’

‘Shur I know ye’re not, m’lord — I always knew ye’d go places, an’ I’m not just plawmassin’ ye now.’

The origin of plámás is unknown. One suggestion is that it’s a corrupted form of blanc-mange, but the link seems tenuous. There’s a related word plásaí /’plɔ:si:/ (plausy, plauzy, plausey, plossey), which can mean either flattery or flatterer. See the previous link for examples.

When plámás was mentioned in the London Review of Books (1999), it prompted a letter with this amusing comment:

It is a word my Irish mother often uses in a verbal mode. I’d always thought it was ‘plum-arse’, as in ‘You’d think that Tony Blair could plum-arse them all into agreement, he’s certainly got the mouth for it.’

I wonder if this line was borrowed verbatim. Plum-arse probably qualifies as an eggcorn, but it’s unlikely to gain any currency given the original term’s scarcity. Even in Ireland, plámás isn’t in common usage: an enthusiastic commenter on Boards.ie from Gorey, Co. Wexford thought plámás was a word his mother had invented.

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(To mark long vowels in IPA, I’ve used ordinary colons instead of the standard triangular marks, because WordPress isn’t rendering the latter clearly.)

[more Hiberno-English]

Updates:

Plámás making headlines in the Irish Times Magazine (7 March 2026), in which Australian columnist Brianna Parkins digs into the cultural differences between her native and adopted lands:

If there’s one difference I’ve noticed in Ireland it’s that decision-makers will heap praise on me when they’re trying to pay me less than I would like. […]

Like the time my colleague told me I need to “sweeten up” a person for them to essentially do their basic job description. I was annoyed I had to perform flattery to get them function but this was Ireland where it was considered manners so I did.

What Irish culture might consider harmless plámásing, Australians might see as an attempt to “piss down their back and tell them it’s raining”. […] Personally, I prefer abrasive honesty while still yearning for the mandatory 10-minute friendly chit chat at the start of Irish meetings.

Plámás, a coffee shop on Dominick Street in Galway, Ireland

A woman didn’t think she had an accent. A linguist proved her wrong with just one word.

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In Southern California the phrase "coffee shop" used to mean "diner", but now it means a place that you can lounge around in with espresso drinks. See e.g. the pictured sign: Jack's started up in 1933. Does anyone have any idea when this changed? I feel like it was sometime in the 90s but don't really know.

I'm also curious how widespread this usage was (or is, if it's still used anywhere). Just Southern California? All of California? Elsewhere?

#LosAngeles #SouthernCalifornia #California #CoffeeShop #Diner #Localism #Dialects #Vernacular

Giving out, Irish style

The phrasal verb give out has several common senses:

distribute – ‘she gave out free passes to the gig’

emit – ‘the machine gave out a distinctive hum’

break down, stop working – ‘at the end of the marathon her legs gave out’

become used up – ‘their reserves of patience finally gave out’

declare, make known – ‘management gave out that it would change the procedure’

In Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale I read an example of this last sense: ‘At the moment the Communist Party is giving out that he was off his head.’ Had Fleming been Irish, this line would be ambiguous – give out in Irish English commonly means complain, grumble, moan; or criticise, scold, reprimand, tell off.

I think this give out comes from Irish tabhair amach, same meaning. It’s intransitive and often followed by to [a person]. People might give out to someone for some mistake, oversight, or character flaw, or about politics, the weather, or the state of the roads. Or they might just give out in an unspecific or habitual way.

Here are some examples from literature:

He always seemed to be in bad humour and was always giving out. (Joe McVeigh, Taking a Stand: Memoir of an Irish Priest)

Pot Belly gives out and tells Slapper he’s not to be going home in this weather. (Claire Keegan, ‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’, in Antarctica)

She had a good figure, although she was always giving out about her too-tight size twelve jeans, but she said buying a pair of size fourteens would be giving in. (Fiona O’Brien, Without Him)

‘If I eat any more turnips I’ll turn bleedin’ yellow.’
‘Ah, don’t be always giving out,’ said Mother. (Christy Brown, Down All the Days)

Giving out to him the whole time: ‘I’ve hated you for years, you old fecker, so take this.’ (Anne Emery, Obit: A Mystery)

Both brothers would do Mr McGurk’s voice but Tee-J did it brilliant. He did Mr McGurk as a cranky old farmer who was always giving out. (Kevin Barry, ‘White Hitachi’, in Dark Lies the Island)

Greenfinch (Carduelis chloris) giving out to me about something

Irish give out is sometimes intensified by adding stink, yards, spades, to high heaven, or the pay:

Afterwards in the car my mother would give out yards to my father for being so generous to his sponging relations. (Sinead Moriarty, Keeping It In the Family)

Of course you prefer your little pet of a daughter who gave out stink to me this morning and wanted me to shift myself and my bed and I in the throes of mortal suffering. (John B. Keane, Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer and other stories)

I heard the mother giving out stink to the father about it the other night; she was doing the old shout-whisper… (Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart)

‘I had her mother on the phone to me last night, giving out yards.’ (Clare Dowling, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)

‘We’re gone fierce boring now. Real suburbanites, I guess. Mowing the lawn and giving out yards about the neighbours.’ (Joseph O’Connor, Two Little Clouds)

For all we know, they give out to high heaven behind closed doors but we’ve no indication of that so we have to presume they are ok with things. (JoeyFantastic on Munsterfans.com forum)

…even if I did have to listen to him giving out the pay about the dangers of the Teddy Boys now inhabiting the place. (Brendan Behan, Confessions of an Irish Rebel)

Bernard Share, in Slanguage, says give out is an abbreviation of give out the hour, and is also seen in the form give off. I haven’t encountered these versions much.

Dermot, she said again, say something. Give off to me but don’t stay quiet. (Dermot Healy, The Bend for Home)

You’ll find give out = complain, criticise, etc. in many dictionaries of Irish slang, but it’s not slang: it’s an idiom in most or all of the dialects on this island, a regular feature of vernacular Hiberno-English. And it doesn’t end there.

On Twitter, Oliver Farry said ‘people in Kansas and Missouri use give out in much the same way as Irish people do’. This was news to me, and I’d be interested to hear more about it – or about its use anywhere else in this Irish sense. Including Ireland: I use it myself. But don’t give out to me if I’ve overlooked something important.

Update:

LanguageHat follows up, wondering about the Kansas/Missouri use of the phrase. A few commenters from these States have never heard it, so its distribution is evidently limited.

Eoin McGee’s book How to Be Good with Money (Gill Books, 2020) has a sentence with Irish English give out ‘complain’ followed by standardized-English give out ‘issue, distribute’:

The banks often give out that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out the money people need.

[Hiberno-English archives]

Ijit, idjit, eejit, idiot

After reading a lot of Stephen King in my teens and early 20s, I went about 15 years not reading him at all. Then I came across Dolores Claiborne in a local bookshop and immediately bumped it to the upper reaches of my book mountain. I’ve long admired the film adaptation, so I was more than a little curious to visit the source.

Set on an island off the coast of Maine, New England, it’s a memorable story told very well as a continuous narrative in Dolores’s dialectal speech. It has one lexical feature that I want to mention here. No spoilers follow:

…the biggest ijit in the world coulda told he didn’t think I’d do any such thing once I finally understood what’d happened

I don’t remember seeing the word ijit in print before. Obviously it’s a regional form of idiot – like idjit, another variant – and means more or less the same thing (see eejit, below), but it’s interesting how its pronunciation /’ɪdʒət/ ‘idget’ differs from the standard /’ɪdiət/ ‘iddy-uht’. I suppose this is related to the tendency for /dj/ to shift to /dʒ/ in words like due and during.

Ijit has only one hit in COCA; idjit has three, including the amusing line ‘an optimist […] is just a crossword puzzle way of saying idjit’. Browsing Google Books, though, I see that they’re not so rare, ijit occurring for instance in a story by Jacques Futrelle, who lived not far from Maine in Scituate, Massachusetts.

I expect they occur here and there around the English-speaking world. Wordnik aggregates several colloquial examples of both forms. Rooting around some more, I see that ijit is also an old African American word, mentioned in Hubert Anthony Shands’s Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi (1893):

Eejit is the Irish English equivalent, and is common in fictional and vernacular dialogue. It doesn’t connote intellectual difficulty – idiot can – instead signalling foolish behaviour, be it chronic or occasional. Eejit is softer than idiot, and is not generally used hurtfully but to gently criticise someone the speaker knows and may well hold in affection. I imagine this is also true of ijit and idjit, but I’m open to correction.

Eejit can, of course, be used in self-criticism, as in this example from Jennifer Johnston’s novel Shadows on Our Skin:

And he hadn’t done his homework, let alone his extra homework. Eejit. Eejit.

T. P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers a few literary examples of eejit and a note on pronunciation: that it approximates the Irish rendering of d and i. Take for example the Irish words Dia (God) /’dʲi:æ/ and idir (between) /’ɪdʲər/. [Edit: See the comments for more on this.]

‘You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,’ his old father used to say snappishly. (William Trevor, Fools of Fortune)

Common modifiers of eejit include big, awful, feckin’, fuckin’, and oul’ (also ould, aul’, auld). Its jocular flavour made it a frequent favourite in the TV comedy Father Ted, and might help explain why the word was found to be not unparliamentary when it was used in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Irish English as Represented in Film by Shane Walshe presents some uses of the word in films, but you’ll have to turn your head sideways to read them. Like an eejit.

#books #dialects #DoloresClaiborne #HibernoEnglish #insults #IrishEnglish #language #phonetics #pronunciation #slang #speech #spelling #StephenKing #usage #words