So, If you didn't already know from my incessant complaining, I spend a lot of time on the train system of Ireland....a couple hours a day. When I'm not sleeping, attempting to do the ridiculously difficult European crossword puzzles or trying to count the housing estates from Drogheda to Dublin, I eavesdrop on other people's (sometimes) interesting conversations...
The other day, I was sitting near a couple of older Irish ladies on a day trip from Dublin. They spent a lot of time discussing the depressing fact that everyone from, "the older generation," were, "in the graveyard..." but luckily, they moved on to grammar and the English language. One of the ladies told the other one, "You know, those Canadians, they don't speak properly at-all. They speak Americanne..." (Does that mean Irish people speak Irlande...) She went on to tell some anecdote about the appallingly bad grammer and vocabulary of some North American acquaintance... Can you believe they say, To-may-to?! Shocking. Truly. Made sure to make a call on my mobile so that they would be aware of the fact that they were busted shit-talking in the presence of a fluent speaker of Americanne....haha
The other equally shocking statement I overheard on the train, was one older lady telling another how the weather in July, was, "just lovely, absolutely gorgeous..." Clearly we were not living in the same country during the month of July cuz I'm still waiting for summer to arrive....
All aboard.
8.08.2005
Overheard on the Enterprise
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On the first day of my MA in (unnamed Irish university) we got a ten-minute rant from one lecturer about how we're in Ireland, and so we would have to use Irish spellings, and we would FAIL if we used American ones (e.g. color, labor, synthesize). I thought he just didn't know that there was an American in the room, and so I wasn't too bothered about it, and I didn't raise my hand to say something like, "But sir, American spellings of words ending in -or are actually closer to the Latin root of third declension nouns, so if you're so concerned about authenticity, why not use them?" But then I saw his class list on the way out, which had my name, AND my nationality on it, and I kinda wished I had.
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