This article is from page 65 of the 2008-06-10 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 65 JPG
FOR any reader who is not edu- cated in what the meaning of the word “minker” is or what part of your anatomy you would put “Rub- ber Dollies” on, For Focal Sake – the book that celebrates all of Ireland’s slang on a county-by-county basis, has just been released.
It was written by people from the 32 counties who gave a focal (or two)
about their county on www.slang.ie. The book is entitled For Focal Sake and contains over 500 slang terms.
Under the section for Clare slang, the book explains that the word “Jag (v) means “to shift, court, feek, see etc. someone, for example “Skutch out of it yee dirty feckers… go jag somewhere else.”
Gobaloon is “another word for a dope or eeyjit.” And of a fat person ‘That person is a lunchbox.”
“In October 2007 a competition was set up between the 32 counties of Ireland on www.slang.ie in order to capture the various nuances of our mudder tongue’, a spokesman for the book’s compilers said.
“Within a matter of months there were literally thousands of entries added to it by people from all over d’internet. The order of the counties in the book was determined by their placement on the www.slang.ie lead-
er-board on February 18. Cork was the outright winner of the competi- tion and as a result appears first in the book.
The book contains a general Irish slang section with 15 lessons about how we ‘spayke’ as well as a selec- tion of choice vocabulary. Lesson 13 deals with “drunken focal”.
“Trish people have a huge variety of adjectives to describe the various stages of drunken intoxication. When
they go on a “session” the following words might describe the resultant State: blithero, blocked, blootered, blotto, drunk, buckled, bunched, flamin’, flootered, full as a bingo bus, gallybandered, etc.”
The book also has 32 chapters, one for each county, which includes a profile on the county detailing songs, nicknames, funny place names and a paragraph describing it. Available from Eason’s the book costs €9.99.