Séamas O'Reilly: The power of words... and the meanings they hold

The striking thing about that passage is that it’s true. Your entire life you’ve internalised norms and rules for the way you speak, but without ever realising you’re doing so.

A tumbling chain of seven words isn’t necessary to demonstrate the effect. You can do it with two or three quite easily. 

If someone off-handedly referred to “a brown big dog” or complimented you on your “new woolly nice jumper” you’d think they were hopelessly confused, or perhaps cognitively impaired, just as you would if they said “raining dogs and cats” or “without reason or rhyme”. 

If a child, or someone learning English as a second language, were to make such errors, you’d probably be moved to correct them, but without articulating precisely why they were errors at all.

More alarming still is the fact that, if you scan through your mental rolodex as far as you possibly can, you probably never have heard a native English-speaking adult confuse word order like that. 

No matter how poorly any of us would score on a literacy test or a grammar aptitude exam, this entirely invisible adjective hierarchy is fully ingrained in our brains, even though it’s never been explicitly taught to us, and despite the fact that almost no native anglophone, whatever their linguistic gifts, would be able to write out that order off-hand.

So many of the rules governing our language are invisible to us, even when we use them every day. This is true even at the level of the words we use to describe identical things. 

The classical English example is the delineation between farmyard animals and their resulting meat. 

We do not eat cow, pig or sheep, but beef, pork and mutton (although where the admittedly literal ‘lamb’ factors into this arrangement, I do not know). 

In each of these cases, the names we give animals come from Anglo-Saxon and the food products from French, because the people tending to the livestock were the lower orders, speaking Anglo-Saxon, whereas those experiencing them only as feasting material were the Norman aristocracy. 

At the point of death, therefore, these savage beasts became ennobled, with a bifurcation of meaning that persists to the modern day.

DISTINCTIONS OF MEANING

Sometimes the distinctions are not merely of language but of meaning. 

People coming to Ireland are immigrants, a term increasingly freighted with connotations of burden, fear, and alienness. (In America, of course, this is made literal by their continued, if decreasing, use of the term ‘alien’ in this context). 

People leaving Ireland, by contrast, are emigrants, a term with no such baggage. 

Emigrant conjures imagery of those striving for a different life elsewhere, of bittersweet tears at Dublin Airport and postcards home from some far-flung locale. 

It is not an entirely happy notion, since there is a sense of loss at departure, but also the promise of them returning home with fancy foreign goods at Christmas, and a charming tan. 

The fact that they, themselves, are just immigrants viewed from the other end of the telescope is so obvious that it’s trite to even mention it but, even with this knowledge, the different meanings contained within both words persist. 

And that’s before we even get to the term “expat”, which divorces them from immigrant status even further.

I’ve never quite worked out the exact point where “foreign worker” ends and “expat” begins, except that the distinction appears to be closely coupled to how much money the person is paid. 

I just know that my friends’ dads who worked on British or German building sites for half a decade were never expats, and that all the Irish project managers and oil executives working in Saudi or Dubai are never foreign workers. 

I also have a feeling that if we reworded all the current headlines from figures in the press and government about Ireland’s current immigration debate, they would read rather strangely.

I have yet to encounter any mention of an “expat crisis” nor heard sober statements from politicians regarding their constituents’ “reasonable concerns about expats in their areas”. 

And when people clash on the streets over these issues are they “campaigners” or “activists”? Are their gatherings “demonstrations”, “protests”, or “riots”?

KNOWN TO GARDAÍ?

I know that from Bloody Sunday to Gaza, a 15-year-old boy shot dead can be a “child”, a “teenager”, or a “young man”, depending on who’s doing the reporting, and that “died”, “killed”, and “slaughtered” all have their own use cases for similar reasons. 

I know that when comfortably middle-class people die of drug overdoses, it is — quite rightly — described as “tragic”, they are “troubled” and we are “devastated”. Less well-heeled addicts are “users” and, well, we tend not to speak about their deaths quite as much at all.

As a nerdy child, I used to enjoy words that didn’t appear to have direct opposites. Was it possible, I often wondered aloud, for a person to be gruntled, illusioned, plussed or chalant? 

I know that there is such a thing as a “good family”, and that this is regularly referred to by police and judges during sentencing for horrible crimes. 

I know that they’re polite enough to avoid the opposite phenomenon, and have therefore never heard one reference to a “bad family” in such statements. 

Although, if a family is described as “known to Gardaí” it’s unlikely they’ve received that designation because they’re enthusiastic fundraisers at their local station’s summer barbecue.

We are, in so many ways, one society separated by a common language. I know there is some cause for all of these distinctions, their reason or rhyme just escapes me right now.