Jackie McGregor: What's the craic? The language barrier between the generation is a quare geg
Whilst cooking and listening to the radio I heard cricket umpire Dickie Bird, had died. Thoughts of my father filled my head. He often used the phrase, “not a dicky bird,” rhyming slang for “not a word.”
Interrupting my memories, my son arrived home and asked, “What’s for dinner?
“Your favourite, chilli, and I bought you a new hoodie, it’s on your bed,” I said.
“You’re the goat mum,” he replied.
I wasn’t sure if I’d just been insulted, holding my smile I waited until he disappeared upstairs, before Googling the meaning of “goat.”
I was pleasantly surprised to learn it was unrelated to my menopausal chin hair, and that GOAT is an acronym for, “greatest of all time.”
Lately, I find myself having to frequently revert to Google regarding mother-son communications. I receive acronym-heavy text messages from him and need to look up things like TLDR (too long didn’t read) or G2G (got to go).
It’s like breaking the Enigma code.
When I pass his room and I hear him talking to friends, I struggle to understand the lingo. It reminds me of that scene from the movie ‘Airplane’, where the air hostess can’t understand what the two African American men are saying, fortunately an old lady speaks “Jive Talk,” and translates for her.
I could do with a Gen Z interpreter.
Nostalgically, my mind wondered back to sayings from my youth. If someone did or said something silly, my mother would say “your head’s cut,” or call them “a quare geg”. She claimed that I could “talk the hind leg off a donkey” because I was so chatty. If I was in a bad mood, she’d call me “crabbit.”
If Mum thought someone was untrustworthy, she’d describe them as “sleekit” or a “slippy-tit.” If a man had several children, she’d comment, “he knows it’s not for stirring his tea with!”
In my Generation X youth, language came from a pre-internet world, a time when face to face banter reigned supreme. Phrases were cutting and uniquely local. An idiot wasn’t simply an idiot he was a “buck eejit,” a phrase steeped in local dialect. We had a language all our own passed through generations.
Now, the digital revolution is changing how language is created and shared. Phrases that took years to permeate a community now spread in a matter of hours via social media. It’s globally influenced with no direct connection to our traditional lexicon. Youths now are more likely to use words like rizz (charisma) than to utter a classic localism.
Happily, I get to verbally bamboozle my Gen Z son occasionally. Yesterday I said my skin felt as rough as “purdy oaten.”
“As what?” he asked.
“That was one of mum’s favourite sayings,” and I told him other phrases she used to use.
“I’m not sure what purdy oaten was, but apparently, it was rough!” I shrugged, smiling wistfully.
“Okay, well good luck with keeping that one alive,” he said smiling, kindness in his eyes. We had one of our little mother-son moments.
He was indulging me in nostalgia about my late mother, knowing I missed her, and I was basking in the glow that he loved me enough to do so.
Some communication transcends spoken words, as author George Carlin said: “Everybody smiles in the same language.”