Faced with a deluge of unfamiliarity from almost all corners of Ireland, I was beginning to doubt that the sentence-ending superlative “it took out!” (Diary, April 17th) was a recognised phrase anywhere other than my own head.
Then came reassurance from reader Catherine McVerry, a native of south Armagh now exiled in Warrenpoint. She hadn’t heard it since the 1980s, when she left home for Guernsey, then England, and later Dublin.
But among her youthful friends in “Cullyhanna, Crossmaglen, and Culloville”, it was a common expression, used to describe anything “outrageous”.
The phrase came to her so naturally at the time that, in Guernsey, she once deployed it to a work foreman when complaining about the rude language of a colleague. It was met with incomprehension.
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Today, it’s like “an old friend” of the kind she would still bump into on a visit home. She advises me: “Go to a bar in Crossmaglen and slip it in speech and people my age will nod in agreement.”
Relieved to hear this, I was then further vindicated by a fellow member of the new Twitter, Bluesky, who identified herself by the username dóchas is grá (hope and love).
She weighed in with the clincher: a link to an instructional video on YouTube by that great authority on language, Oliver Callan.
I’m not sure how I could have forgotten it, but about 15 years ago, on his RTÉ radio series Nob Nation, Oliver gave a two-part Linguaphone-style beginner’s course in the dialect of what he called “Monaghan Man”.
In fact, it was more like “Carrickmacross Man”: I’m surprised people north of Castleblayney didn’t all sue for slander by association.
And not the least funny thing about it was that, in interpreting the robust vernacular of the region, the sketch featured my illustrious predecessor on this column, Kevin Myers (as also voiced by Callan), who translated the Monaghanese into standard English.
Anyway, sure enough, among such well-known local phrases as “I’ll redden yer arse for ye!” and “as awkward as a sow in reverse”, there was our old friend: “It took out”. Or to more precise: “It pure took out!” Which was interpreted to mean: “It was a great occasion.”
Oliver is not himself a Carrick man, exactly. To quote another phrase mentioned here on Thursday, he’s from out the road (in Inniskeen).
As for my Bluesky informant, she seems to have married into the tribe. Hence her familiarity with the Linguaphone course. “My husband went through a phase of making all visitors to the house listen to it as part of their cultural education,” she explained.
In that spirit, for any students who aspire to a more advanced level, I would also recommend a video (easily found on YouTube) in which an extract from the children’s BBC series Postman Pat is overdubbed with the Carrickmacross dialect.
Viewers are advised that it involves language of a kind you wouldn’t want your children using (although I was first alerted to it, gleefully, by my Dublin-born offspring, not long after they’d stopped watching Postman Pat in the original).
Does “took out” derive from Irish? I’m sure it does, somehow. A few years ago, I also wondered here about the origins of another common word from childhood, “nyuck”. It was a vaguely disparaging term that by then I only ever heard myself using of the cat, whenever it turned its nose up at food.
But as I discovered from readers, it has a wide variety of definitions in Ireland, ranging from a verb meaning “steal” to a noun meaning “stupid person”. It also identifies any native of a certain Armagh town, with no intended insult (I think), ie: “Newry Nyuck”.
As for its origin, the most plausible theory offered was the inoffensive Irish word “neach”. Which, even in Dinneen’s dictionary, means nothing worse than “a being, a person, one, oneself, anyone, whoever.”
It’s interesting that Callan’s Monaghan Man added “pure” to “took out”. Pure is of course one of Hiberno-English’s great, intensifying adjectives: typically used about subjects that are the opposite of pure.
Hence that thing GAA fans like to accuse opposition teams of: “pure dirt”. Not that even that phrase is always negative. Pure Dirt is now, among other things, the name of a gourmet hamburger restaurant in Lisburn.
Then, of course, there’s “Pure Mule”, an Offaly term so expressive it launched a TV drama series. That can mean both “really good” and “terrible”: the common factor being intensity of experience.
Which is what I understand from experiences that “took out” too. Despite what the Monaghan Linguaphone course suggests, they’re not always a good thing.
While searching the out-sections of dictionaries lately, by the way, I came across an “outnarawka”, a phenomenon never previously encountered anywhere. It was also unknown (until now) in The Irish Times archive, or any other newspaper database I can access.
But the word is, or used to be, a recognised put-down in Tipperary, at least. Diarmaid Ó Muirithe’s Dictionary of Anglo-Irish records a young woman there once, “annoyed at being pestered by a small man who seemed to think he was God’s gift”, dismissing him as “an outnarawka”.
It’s an anglicisation of Abhac na Ráithe, apparently, meaning “Dwarf of the Quarter”.
