t-h or not t-h

Well, having spent 5 months living in a large North-American city, I've noticed a few simple truths about being Irish. Number 1 is that nobody - absolutely nobody - can understand a fucking word we are saying. Their main bone of contention is that we speak too fast. Of course, as I mentioned to one girl, maybe they listen too slow. The other problem is: slang. Irish slang. As complex and diverse as any other language proper on the planet.

I personally started seeing a local girl while living in the city and had to, after many weeks of confused looks on her part, link to a website listing the over-200 slang words that we (the Oirish!) take for granted. Queue endless queries of "what's a chancer?", "what's a bollox?", and "so, a chancer, bollox, and blagard are all the same, right?". Eh... no, not quite. But sometimes, baby, sometimes. It's something akin to how people always maintain that Eskimos have over a hundred words for snow. The Irish have over a hundred words for "likable cunt that you just can't trust".

Regarding the title of this post though - I have started to feel a little bit treacherous towards my homeland while travelling. My realisation centres on my new found ability to pronounce the letters "t" and "h" in conjunction!

Of course, coming from Ireland - and tons has been written about this in blogs on Irish slang - almost all of us say "tree" as opposed to "three", "trive" as oppose to "thrive" (cause we couldn't get by without thrive!). However... I didn't realise that social pressure - or, to be exact, foreign social pressure - would exert such an influence over me that I would start to pronounce words as they actually appear! Tired of the non-Irish's inability to make the dramatic associative leap from "tree o'clock" to "three o'clock", I've found myself over the last month or two saying the "h" after the "t" in many words simply to avoid their confusing looks!

Yesterday, after not meeting a single fellow-countryman for a month, I finally ended up talking to a guy from Mayo. Nothing major there. But that conversation ended up inspiring this post: I had to re-correct myself to leave out the h! This moment was like finding out that Bruce Willis was a ghost. I'm serious, I was stunned. Before then, the notion that I was starting to pronounce "th" effectively was just a nagging in the back of my mind. Now... here it was in all it's glory - come to mock me.

Now, I'm not exactly fluent yet - that is, I'm still conscious that I'm pronouncing the h - but it is starting to grab hold, and I find myself auto-correcting (apologies, auto-incorrecting - after all, we speak properly, they're wrong) more and more. And as I still have three (see, I even wrote it with the h) months of travelling left, it's only a matter of time before I drift over to the dark side. While I'm sure that this is reversible, and that once home I will soon drop that unnecessary h, the slagging that my friends will give me is not! For I will forever be known as "snobby hole", or something to that effect.