The Irish lilt is a thing of beauty. It moves up and down the vocal scale like a soaring and diving bird rather than the flat and plodding groundhog of American English. It wouldn’t surprise me if Irish was the dialect spoken in the Garden of Eden. Angelic and holy.

“Jesus Christ, I almost stepped on your toe there,” says an older Irish woman at the table next to me. 

Okay, not so angelic and holy. 

I’m in a coffee shop in Swords, a skip and a hop from Dublin. My latte and scone are the price of admission as I’m surrounded by Irish customers taking a break from shopping at the large mall. My wife and my daughter are off doing their thing and I’m unwisely left on my own to eavesdrop.

So far this morning I have heard the name of the Lord called upon in a multitude of creative ways that appear to have nothing to do with spiritual salvation. Clearly, the Irish have an intimate relationship with “your man,” and call upon Him frequently whether they are in church asking for forgiveness or queued in line waiting for a scone.

”Christ, that was unholy good.”

Sister Timothy Mary, my sixth grade teacher at St. Mary’s Elementary School in Iowa City, would have sent them all to the principal’s office and then marched them right to the confessional for such inappropriate language.

“If you want to die and go to hell for cursing, fine. Otherwise, you will say three Our Fathers and two Hail Marys. Now go back to your desks.” Yup, the rules were clearer back in sixth grade.

I do wonder what happened to “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”in this formerly Catholic Ireland. You remember, it is the third “Thou shall not” on the top-ten list from the Old Testament. Perhaps the use of the Lord’s name by my coffee shop neighbor is not “in vain” because it is done with such earnestness and good cheer. In fact, she is smiling like we’re all having a second pint at the pub.

So I sit back, drink my coffee, and listen.

And the older woman does not disappoint. She says loudly to her friend: “Oh Mary, that fecking chair leg is caught on the table.” She pulls hard on the chair and frees the leg. 

Oh my goodness, did I just hear that correctly?

According to my say-a-rosary-every-night mom, the f-word is the very worst curse word one can say. And, sure, “fecking” is not the f-word, but it sure behaves like the forbidden slippery-slope word “geez” for Jesus. In my family, near-miss words still paved the path to perdition. As I was already pretty far down that path by my teenage years, I steered clear of wannabe curse words — that is, until I didn’t when I started teaching cops. Go figure.

Well, according to the “Irish Star,” times have changed: “Nowadays in Ireland feck is essentially a far far milder version of the f word. It can be said on television at any time, and you might even hear it at Sunday mass.”

And Julian Walker with the British Library even argues that “feck” has its origins in the word “faith,” not in the f-word. Can’t get holier than faith. And heck, in today’s political Wild West even politicians drop the f-bomb now and again. See, I AM behind the times.

I order another latte and continue to admire the linguistic vigor of this older woman at the next table. 

And of course the inevitable happens with her crumbly pastry.

“Oh shite,” she says as her buttered scone breaks apart and falls into her lap.

Wow.

Well, it is pronounced with a long “i,” wholly different than the American variation. And apparently the word is quite popular in England and Ireland, along with its close cousin, “gobshite” — a stupid or incompetent person or a braggart. But really?

See how travel opens your mind?

Oh well, my eavesdropping opportunity is over. Time to go. My wife and daughter gather me up and we make our way to the pub. As they drink their hard ciders, I patiently wait for my pint of Guinness to settle and the bartender to do a second pour to give it just the right head. 

“Here it is,” the bartender says, holding the glass with two hands as if raising a chalice.

I thank him. He smiles at my non-Irish accent and says, “God bless you.”

Oh my. Old women curse and bartenders bless.

As I said, the Irish lilt is a thing of beauty. 

Joe