By
noeleenm on December 5th, 2005
As Rome fell and Europe moved into its Dark Ages, Ireland was earning the title ‘the Island of Saints and Scholars’. Today, we don’t even know what a hyphen is…
When I was choosing a name for this site, my web ‘guru’ - a man called Peter McCourt from Interactive Training Ltd. in England , who is a wizard at communicating with search engines, as well as people – advised me to choose a name that used words that are frequently used in searches, as well as being relevant to this blog. So I chose ‘ireland-stories’. The reason for the hyphen…? Well, he explained that Google reads words that run together as one long nonsense word – irelandstories. It doesn’t recognise ‘ireland’ in this version, nor does it recognise ’stories’.
…And if I were to use IrelandStories, I asked? It reads everything as lowercase, he explained, and went on to use WhoRepresents as an example. Try moving the capital from the ‘r’ to the following ‘p’, and you’ll see what he came up with!
What do I get, though, when I try to verbally tell somebody the name of my site? …’A what?!’ ‘What’s this a hyphen is, now?’ This, in a country that produced Yeats, Wilde, and Joyce, and continues to produce people like Nobel winning poet, Seamus Heaney!
It’s also the country that has built a continually expanding industry on TEFL courses, that is Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
Well, I’m thinking of starting a new industry here. It’s teaching older people the foreign language in which our young people, increasingly, communicate. Such as the following text I received recently:- ‘Settled bck at college ok,lot of work 2 b done dis yr!’ The text is from an extremely nice young Irish woman who is attending college at present. The funny thing is, if it were from an elderly Irish person, who had to leave school at 14 years of age, I have no doubt it would be perfectly spelled.
Is it possible that in a country in which the structures and nuances of the Gaelic language can still be heard, although forbidden over 2 centuries ago, the English forced on us by England will itself die off in less than 2 decades?
…But, before it goes, can I just explain that a hyphen is a punctuation mark indicating that two words or syllables are joined? It looks like a short straight line, half way up from the base of the other letters… No, not the long line along the base - that’s an underscore…
I said a hyphen, God dammit! A hyphen…!
Posted in English, IT friends | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on December 2nd, 2005
One of the fascinating things about living with people from other countries is that you realise how wrong some of your stereotypical ideas are about other nationalities – and sometimes how hilariously right!
I don’t just mean how I see the young people who live with me, but how they see each other also.
For instance, when Gint from Latvia first came to my house, he asked who was already living here. I explained that there were two Italians, and his reaction was: ‘Oh, no! They are so noisy!’ But he decided that the rest of the deal (including the rent) overcame his horror of noisy Italians. I couldn’t wait to tell Elke and Michele, and they haven’t stopped teasing him since! In fairness, he takes it in very good part, and is far from averse to teasing them back.
Elke and Michele are actually very considerate about noise, but I must admit I have also seen a couple of explosions between previous Italian guests that left me stunned at the sheer velocity and passion involved. It was high drama at its best. They were Romans, and I wonder (here I go, stereotyping again!) if that explains it, because the only Italian I ever met who exclaimed: ‘Mama mia!’, like an advertisement for ice-cream, was also Roman!
It’s really funny, though, when one of the two Italians (they are not a couple, by the way, just met in my house) starts to explain how things are done in Italy, and the other pipes up in blank consternation: ‘No! We don’t do it that way’! It’s explained, to some extent, by the fact that Elke is from Trento in the Dolomite mountains in the Italian Tyrol, where there’s a huge Austrian influence, and Michele is from the Marche region, near the town of Loreto, on the Adriatic coast, on the calf of Italy’s boot.
That doesn’t explain, of course, why Michele insisted on sleeping with his bedroom windows open, his radiator off, and with only a sheet over him, as winter temperatures plummeted. While Elke sleeps with her windows closed, her radiator up full blast, covered by two duvets and a blanket! Nor does it explain the fact that Elke doesn’t drink coffee - a fact she’s very reluctant to admit as she’s afraid her Italian passport will be revoked if anybody finds out.
Some things, though, they both hold as sacred - like not breaking spaghetti before you cook it. Elke’s shriek of horror frightened the wits out of Gint the other night when she saw him doing this, and when he protested at her over-reaction, she promptly appealed to Michele. I said that Michele had told me that they do it in his part of Italy - just to wind Elke up - and tried to kick Michele under the table to agree. Unfortunately, the table was too long for me to reach, and Michele was too horrified at the idea that his region was being accused of breaking spaghetti for him to get my less than subtle nods. He rejected the idea vehemently and we all ended up in laughter.
Though I should tease…
Elke’s current major giggle is that midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in Ireland is celebrated at 9.30pm. It finished her off entirely when I told her the reason was that some Irish people used to go straight from the pub (which then closed at 11.30pm) to Midnight Mass…
Religion is something we’ve skirted around a bit in our house with this group. I’m the only one who goes to Mass from the house, and the beliefs of the rest of the ‘family’ range from ‘running out of Mass because I couldn’t understand a word in English’, through attendance at Mass last Easter and being shocked because now lay people give out Communion, to ‘I’m a pagan’, which led to an English lesson on the difference between the English words for Agnostic, Atheist, and Pagan, as well as Satanist.
I suspect that religion is skirted around (with me, not among them) out of deference to my obvious faithfulness to Catholicism and my unusual - for me - unwillingness to get involved in this particular discussion at this particular time. The reasons are simple. The first is that I’m tired and short of time quite a lot just now, mostly because I’m very involved with a campaign to stop high density building on the flood plain just downriver from my neighbourhood. The second is that Catholicism, and adherence or otherwise to it, is so complex in Ireland right now that even politics are easier to explain - and less painful.
So I explain whatever I’m asked, and don’t go too deep, for now.
It’s strange that in this melting pot of cultures that is my home just now, the person who most reminds me of ‘who we were’ in terms of Irishness, is Gint.
Gint says he has experienced racism here against East Europeans, particularly in trying to rent a room, and I have no reason to doubt him. He left Latvia to earn money to send home to his mother, and to build a house one day there so he can return to his beloved country and live in comfort and dignity. He built log cabins before he came and still works in the building trade here. And in the house he describes sometimes how the forest smells near his home when you camp out there, and how the light shines on the lake, and how the sun burns in the summer - and I listen and I hear all the heartsickness of all the Irish emigrants who went to England and America, and worked on the buildings there, and dreamed of Mayo and Kerry and Wexford and Leitrim.
…But then that’s just a stereotype, isn’t it?
Posted in House Family, Italy, Latvia | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on December 1st, 2005
Ireland is changing. And my home is a microcosm of that change.
I live in the home in which I was born. My mother gave birth to eight children in the big back bedroom of this house. They reared six of us – enough, despite the pain in the stories they told of the little ones they lost, to fill the house with life and laughter and song.
Among my father’s stories was ‘How Dev stood up to Churchill over the ports’, and among my mother’s were stories she had been told by her father of Big Jim Larkin. These stories defined my childhood home, I think - a hardworking background, with a fierce love of country.
Today I share that same house with three young adults. Two are Italian and one is from Latvia. They are the latest in a small line of young foreign people for whom, I hope, my home has been their home, to some extent and for a while, at least.
Almost three years ago I decided to build on an extension to the two-bedroomed house that had been ample home to eight people so that I could comfortably share with people who were not ‘blood family’. I charge what I feel is a fair rent because I’ve never had the knack of saving money against a sensible future, so I had to take out a substantial mortgage to build the extension. Building societies are funny that way. They expect me to pay it back.
I chose to share with younger people because I like young people and I hoped they would help to keep my mind open to new ideas. I chose mostly to share with young foreign people because it’s the best way I know to learn geography, history, foreign culture, and - sometimes - a little bit about foreign languages, in a fun way.
On the whole it has worked very well. I have tried to make my home their home also for this time that they spend here in Ireland. Granted, it is a home in which the ‘mother’ works and lives a pretty busy life, so they have to cook for themselves, and they’re expected to do their share of keeping the house clean. Granted, too, there are sometimes sulks, arguments, even outright rows. (My reaction the time I arrived home very tired from work and found three of them had gone bowling leaving a cheerful ‘Will do these later!’ note on top of a very large pile of very dirty dishes and very greasy pans - that I needed for my vegetarian dinner - is still spoken of with awe by an Irish girl who lived here at the time.) …But perhaps those kind of rows are a part of home, too…
Mostly, though, it’s a respectful and sometimes funny exchange of ideas and language across the kitchen table, as they explain their views and their culture and ask me to interpret Ireland for them. …And it forces me to define my country in a way that helps me to see how Ireland has changed from the land of the Celt to the home of the children of the Celtic Tiger - the Celtic Cubs.
Posted in McManus Family | No Comments »