Regional Dialects And Why I Apparently Write Like A Leprechaun From Central Casting

I was working on my Nanowrimo project the other day, when I noticed one of those annoying little red squiggles had come under one of my sentences.

I looked at the screen, puzzled. I could see nothing wrong with the word in question. It was 'amn't', a contraction of 'am not'. Maybe Microsoft Word had made a mistake. But I looked and the spell check was set to English UK. I decided to Google it, and I found out that while amn't is an actual word, it's mostly used in hiberno English and Scottish English. (Hibernia is the Roman word for Ireland-land of winter). Apparently the majority of the English speaking world would use 'I'm not' rather than 'I amn't' to say I am not. Who knew?

Using that word identifies the writer with a certain strand of English, and I didn't know that word was one used mostly by Scottish and Irish people.

Do you guys have any words that you use that are particular toyour region? If they're not widely known do you avoid using them? Or do you think it gives your writing an extra flavour?

Blog Awards

Despite being missing and grouchy for most of the past fortnight I've managed to get not one but two awards! Yay! I got the Liebster award from the lovely Scott Stillwell, which is lovely to get. I won't pass it on though, because I've done that a few weeks ago when I received it before.

The second award was from the fantastic Alicia Gregoire. It's the 7x7 Link Award, where you pick 7 blog posts to fit the superlative given. So here are mine!

Most Beautiful: I don't really do beauty, even in blog posts. If my blog posts were a cartoon character they'd be Velma Dinkley. (Note to self: if I got my hair cut in a bob/pudding bowl I could totally carry this look off, btw)

Most Helpful: Five Top Twitter Tips for Writers In my pre-campaign days, this was also my most popular post. The internet loves advice posts, people.

Most Popular: My entry for the first campaign challenge, The Door Swung Open. I think it's going to be the prologue for Ravensborough II.

Most Controversial:  Any post where I attempt to point out that Ireland is not all Riverdance, Guinness, thatched cottages and shamrocks does not do well. Oh, and that Jameson is pronounced 'Jem-eh-son' not 'James son'. Maybe I'll pretend that I do indeed operate my blog from a tiny cottage surrounded by sheep, potato fields, and a group of peasants singing Danny Boy. Which just happens to have a fast broadband connection.


Most Surprisingly Successful: My post on How First Aid Ruined My Life

Most Underrated: I have low self-esteem. I think all of my posts are over-rated.

Most Prideworthy:  Any post where I attempt to point out that Ireland is not all Riverdance, Guinness, thatched cottages and shamrocks. Oh, and that Jameson is pronounced 'Jem-eh-son' not 'James son'.


The seven people I'm passing this award on to are:


Scott Stillwell

Laura Toeniskoetter

Alleged Author

Krista M

Charissa Weaks

Caitlin Vincent

Alexis Bass

There Goes The Neighbourhood...

My husband and I recently moved to a new house. It's in a great location for my husband's job, I'm near my family, and it's further away from a convenience store that sells chocolate than our last home was. Doesn't sound like much of a plus, but I've lost ten pounds. Win.

The one issue was our next door neighbour. Now, she seems nice enough, if a bit nosy. She's the kind of person that knows everyone else's business, and that in itself doesn't bother me. It's the decline of close knit neighbourhood's that has lead to a lot of social problems after all, such as increased crime and depression. However, she seems to take an inordinate amount of interest in our household waste.

Every time I go outside the house when she's there, she reminds me that the council will collect my bin on a certain date. I've explained to her that I don't find the council good, and, as in Ireland you have to pay every time your bin is lifted anyway, I've decided to go to with a private company. Despite this, she sent her son around to remind us about the bin situation a couple of weeks ago. I politely explained our arrangement again. During the week I saw her lifting the lids of our bins to look at what was inside them. How strange is that?

Last night, she called around to make her case at 10.50 pm. Who does that? I'm sorry, if you're calling unannounced to my house at almost eleven, then it needs to be urgent. You need to have seen someone vandalising our car, need help in some immediate way, or be a card carrying member of  An Garda Síochána (the Irish Police Force). Our refuse is collected, it's not piling up on the pavement posing a health risk to the neighbourhood, so what's the problem?


It would seem that by not conforming to the bin collection system of the community, that we are bringing down the neighbourhood. Which is quite ironic coming from people who have a Third Reich-esque eagle on top of their property and hang the Irish tricolour. In other countries, I know it is perfectly normal to hang a flag from your property, in Ireland it is connected with strong nationalist political views and sympathy with the IRA. Now, I'm not saying for one minute that my neighbourfolk hold any of these extreme political ideas, but that their questionable taste in house adornments doesn't exactly reflect well on the rest of us. People in glass houses and all that.  

Road Trip Wednesday: Real Life Settings

The nice people over at YA Highway a ‘Blog Carnival’ every Wednesday, where the contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on their own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week the prompt is: What is the most inspiring setting you've ever visited in real life? My answer is fairly predictable and boring for an Irish writer, it's the west of Ireland. The landscape is so beautiful in a harsh and rugged way, and the wide open spaces give your mind room to think properly, away from the constraints of concrete buildings, neon lights and worries about bills, the day job and city life. I'm definitely a Dublin girl at heart, but I love the west. I dream about going on a writers retreat there one day.

What about you? Any inspirational places?

 

The Sea: A Love Story

I don't know what it is about the sea, but it just calms me. I like to think it's because my surname come from the word Moray, the Scottish term for a sea settlement. But that's just fanciful talk.

I used to live by the sea when I was a little girl, and I still miss it. Hopefully, one day I'll live beside it again. I never feel quite as calm as I do when I'm beside the sea, and I find it very inspiring. I get some of my best story ideas sitting on the shore.

The great thing about Dublin is its size. From the city centre, a thirty minute drive in any direction will bring you to the mountains, the sea or the countryside. I love that about the place. That and the winding back streets that evolved over hundreds of years.

*What about all of you? Is there anything about where you live that gives you inspiration?*

*I'm on holiday, so I'll respond to any comments when I come back*

So the rain has finally stopped...

So the rain has finally stopped. Despite the past two weeks displaying the type of weather usually seen in mid-October, Ireland seems to have finally remembered that is actually technically summertime. Yesterday and today  have seen sun, blue skies and zero precipitation. For an island with a climate that is enticingly summed up as  'mild, moist and changeable with abundant rainfall and a lack of temperature extremes' this is pretty much as good as it gets. 


Hopefully it will last, because myself and the husband are going on holiday on Saturday to Wexford with my family. I have six brothers and sisters ranging from one year old to fourteen, so being cooped up indoors will not be good times. Last time my I went on holidays with my family, we ended up spending most of the holiday in matching navy rain jackets like a water-proof version of the Waltons, and had our traditional holiday ice-cream huddled in a doorway sheltering from the wind. This was on the west coast, where the weather tends to be more extreme. Hopefully Wexford, in the so-called 'Sunny South-East' will be a little bit more hospitable. How can you have a sunny south east coast on an island that has 'abundant rainfall and a lack of temperature extremes' you ask? Well, everything's relative.


Honestly, I'm really looking forward to it. The past year as been really tough, for a number of reasons, and it will be nice to get away from it all. If this will in fact be possible. I'm bringing my netbook with me, I'm worried about leaving it in the house while I'm away, and it may prove difficult to avoid writing something...


What about all of you? Do you find it hard to clock off on holiday?


On a side note, I'm up to 103 followers! Woot! I appreciate each and every follow, thank s so much :)  

In which Christine visits the Rebel County and thinks about the Queen...

The reason that I haven't been blogging much over the past weekend is because I was away. Myself and my husband were in Cork City for a training course, and there was just so much on that I couldn't come up with one logical sentence to put up for y'all. I did, however, manage to get some editing done on the train down there and back. I think I deserve a gold star for that.

Cork was named a European Capital of Culture in 2005, and it must be true because I saw a man weaving his way through rush hour traffic on a unicycle while playing a guitar and singing. Honestly, this really happened. I swear.

Today marks the first day of Queen Elizabeth II's visit to Ireland, the first time in 100 years that a British monarch has visited us. This is a good thing for Anglo-Irish relations, but I do question why it had to happen now. Ireland is in a huge amount of debt, and implementing the required security measures will cost in the region of €20 million. We don't have enough beds in hospitals, teachers are being let go, the number of Gardai (Irish police) is going down and taxes are climbing to deal with our bailout.Cars can't be parked on many streets, including outside The Rotunda, one of Dublin's main maternity hospitals. Operations in some hospitals have been cancelled. I don't blame the Queen on this, but I question why we had to wait so long to invite her anyway. Britain are our nearest neighbours, we have a huge amount in common and for the Republic of Ireland armed conflict ended years ago.

There have been a number of bombs around the capital, and in London, put down by people who object to the Queen's visit on principle. Luckily none of them have gone off. This makes me ashamed, to be honest. As I said, Ireland is independent now. The struggles are in the past, and anyway, Queen Elizabeth II presided over none of it. As for the knotty problem of Northern Ireland, I don't feel as an Irish citizen I have a right to lay claim to that piece of land. I don't think the UK have the right either. It is up to the people of Northern Ireland to decide their own destiny, through peaceful means, and that's that.

I hope the visit goes off smoothly, and that the occasion isn't marred by any violent incident. The last thing this island needs is more bloodshed.

J is for... (The New York) Jets

Ok, I'm a little ahead of myself here, but I discovered if I blog the A-Z challenge straight then it will take me up to April 26 when the next round of ABNA come out and we find out who has made it to the semi-finals.

So, today I'm going to talk about my one sporting love, American football. Thankfully it's starting to become a bit more mainstream in Europe, so we can watch it on TV rather than on a series of dodgy streams that seem to get taken down every time something really exciting is going to happen.

I'm not a sport person. I don't watch soccer, Gaelic football, hurling, rugby or any of that. But my husband's family holidayed in Florida regularly, and they had once gone to a Miami Dolphins game while Dan Marino was still playing. They lost. But that didn't matter to my then-teenage husband. He was hooked, and a Dolphins fan forever more.

Fast forward to our honeymoon in New York ( '...concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there's nothing you can't doooo...' you get the idea). It had been over a decade since my husband had last seen a live game. With great generosity of spirit, I agreed to go out to Meadowlands and watch the Giants take on the Jets. My only stipulation was that I could have a hotdog and a plastic glass of beer while watching the game, like I had seen people do in the movies. (Yes, this is an American stereotype and I know not everyone in the US does this, but in my defence when people come to Ireland they want to go to a thatched-roof pub, listen to Irish rebel songs while drinking a pint of Guinness. I have never done this. I also have never sung rebel songs about eight hundred years of British occupation. Except when the United Kingdom score us low in The Eurovision Song Contest.)  Obviously, the Jets and the Dolphins are rivals, so we would be supporting the Giants.

When we got to Meadowlands, all of the merchandise was for the New York Giants. The jumbotrons urged us to cheer for the Giants, when they were in offence and in defence. The Giants were winning. Now, a little thing about my home country. We are a tiny island with a population of about four million people, and we don't invest a huge amount in sport. We don't have a huge pool of talent from which to choose from.We go in to every sporting occasion expecting to lose. When athletes from other countries qualify for something like the Olympics, they think it's the start of something. In Ireland, if our athletes qualify, then we've won. We'll send our athletes, wave our flag and cheer them on. If they don't win, that's ok. We're used to it. We qualified, anything else is a bonus. We are sporting underdogs.

I felt for the poor Jets. They were behind, their fans were outnumbered by Giants' fans. The jumbotrons couldn't care less about them. So, used to supporting the underdog, I switched allegiance, much to the chagrin of my Miami Dolphin supporting husband. The Jets then came from behind to win the game. There's a message in there somewhere I feel.

I love American football now. It's such a social game, the break between the downs gives you a chance to discuss the game, and I love the way the referee explains his decisions to the crowd. Only problem is, the Jets have turned into a great team, and have narrowly missed out on Superbowl two years running. I'm supporting a strong team, I don't know what to do with myself.

**Disclaimer**

I can actually spell, and I spell check every post. Any differences in spelling are down to the way we spell in the British Isles as opposed to in the USA. I've got a couple of comments about my spelling, just wanted to clear that up.

E is for...Eireann

Ok, I'm slightly changing the rules here, because Eireann is an Irish word, not an English one. But then again, who said that the words had to be in English.

Eireann means Ireland, and it's the country where I was born and I've lived here all my life. I love it. Not in a republican, nationalistic sense, but in a more familial way. Yes it has bad points. Yes it's tiny. Yes it rains most of the time. Yes we have hit the international headlines this past year for all the wrong reasons. But it's home.

I like the landscape, I like the people and I like the way we have an ability to laugh at ourselves. I even, God help me, like the rain. But what I'm proudest of, is the fact that despite being a poor nation for most of our existence, and despite having a small population, we have produced a lot of great literature. From Joyce and Wilde to Yeats and Shaw. A lot of our current female writers, Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern and Cathy Kelly sell copies of their books worldwide.

Dublin City, where I live, is a UNESCO City of Literature. And amid all the recessionary doom and gloom, the unemployment, our national debt, I think that is something to be proud of.