I read Rule of the Land years ago (a gift from Sinéad Gleeson) and was very impressed by it. Recently I read Carr's novel, shortlisted at the Irish Book Awards 2025, and found it a whole other kettle of complicated fish and family. The village it's set in becomes a character in its own right in a sort of wry, John McGahern way. Both well worth reading.

#books #IrishBooks #reading #GarrettCarr #fiction #nonfiction #Ireland

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]

Ted Turton, the painter who co-founded the Galway Arts Festival, wrote a wonderful memoir about his adventures with the legendary Footsbarn Travelling Theatre. I had the pleasure of copy-editing it.

Here's a short review in the Irish Times, and Ted's testimonial for my work. If you're looking for an editor or proofreader, I'm available!

https://tedturtonart.com/
https://stancarey.com/testimonials/

#books #memoir #theatre #IrishBooks #TedTurton #Footsbarn #painting #copyediting #editing #Mastodaoine #arts

Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland

From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):

let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”

I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.

Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?

Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)

Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)

Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.

How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:

a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.

An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.

This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.

[image source]

Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.

Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.

Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)

Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)

So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.

Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.

I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)

And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)

A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.

My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.

If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)

Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)

Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.

Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.

Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”

In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.

Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?

https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945

*

Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.

Updates:

Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):

“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]

The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”

Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.

At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”

I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:

#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing

Happy #Halloween Everyone! I was thinking about what books I would recommend around this time of year and remembered a review I did back in 2023 - Big Bad Me by @Ashilockie

I reposted to my blog here: https://markkieltywriter.com/2025/10/31/book-review-big-bad-me-by-aislinn-oloughlin/

Excellent book with #Buffy the Vampire vibes.

#YAFantasy #Supernatural #IrishBookBlogger #ReadingCommunity #MastoDaoine #IrishBooks

Escape to 19th-century Ireland with The Fitzgeralds of Dublin Series.

Books 1-9 box sets - http://mybook.to/FitzgeraldsBoxSets

#TheFitzgeraldsOfDublinSeries #Books #BooksByLornaPeel #FamilySaga #HistoricalFiction #19thCentury #Ireland #IrishFiction #IrishBooks #KindleUnlimited

Can Will and Isobel navigate an uncertain future?

A Perfect Solution: The Fitzgeralds of Dublin Book Ten is out on 2 October and is available for pre-order.

Amazon - http://mybook.to/aperfectsolution

#TheFitzgeraldsOfDublinSeries #Books #BooksByLornaPeel #FamilySaga #HistoricalFiction #19thCentury #Dublin #Ireland #IrishFiction #IrishBooks