Irishman's Diary: A question of when and weather

Inquiring about a mutual acquaintance recently, a friend asked me: "Where is he this weather?" I couldn't answer. Now that I thought about it, I hadn't seen the third party this weather (it was balmy at the time), nor the previous weather (a cold snap), nor the one before that (rain). In fact, I realised, I hadn't seen him for at least a year. And in Ireland, that's a lot of weather. The incident set me thinking about Ireland's strange relationship between time and meteorology, which is enshrined even in Irish grammar. There, we use to the same word (aimsir) to mean both "weather" and "tense". Which among other things gives rise to an excellent joke on TG4, where the Aimsir Láithreach ("present tense") is also the title of the weather forecast.

Other parts of the universe have a space-time continuum. We seem to have a weather-time one, although native colloquialisms aside, we’re far from unique in the terminological coincidence that underlies it. I can’t think of an equivalent in British English.

But French, for example, uses the same word for time and weather (temps). So does Spanish (tiempo). In fact, all the Romance languages have something similar. Interestingly, in the Irish-English phrase, it's always "this" weather. You would never inquire where somebody was "that weather", even in the case of famous past meteorological events, like Hurricane Charlie or the Night of the Big Wind, when people might well have gone missing for a while. Equally, predictions of where a man might be in future weather are never entertained. Of course, leaving weather aside for a moment, present-tense constructions are more common in Hiberno-English than in other dialects, and are often explained by the absence of a verb to "have" in the Irish mother tongue. Instead of saying "I've just had dinner", therefore, we tend to say "I'm only after having dinner".

Or as a shocked Alf Bergan puts it in Ulysses, speaking of Paddy Dignam (whose whereabouts this weather he thinks he knows, until learning of his funeral): "Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago."

The construction sometimes confuses speakers of non-Irish English, who mistake the word "after" as implying a stated intention to do something. Thus, as Terry Dolan explains in his Dictionary of Hiberno-English, the phrase "I'm after having my dinner" can be misunderstood as "I'm in pursuit of having my dinner" (especially, I suppose, if the speaker is holding a fishing rod, or a shotgun).

But then, English in general is fraught with potential for confusion, as I know only too well. Writing about grammar – one of my bad habits – I have more than once been accused of mixing up the concept of “tense”, which relates to time, with that of “mood”, which relates to manner of expression. If it happens again, I’ll blame the weather.

I’m reminded here of what I think is another habit unique to Irish-English – a certain, nuanced use of the word “now”. Visitors to the country may conclude that “now” is, in every sense, a more flexible concept in these parts, in that it sometimes seems to translate as “later” or “next week”.

But I don’t mean that, really. What I mean is the way we use “now” at the end of a sentence. There, it often has no reference to the weather-time continuum.

Instead, somehow, it can convey disagreement, sarcasm, or even outright contradiction of a previous statement. It may be my imagination, but Irish women seem to deploy the sentence-ending “now” with more chilling effect than men. A husband may suggest, for example, that he’s “going to the pub with friends later”. But if his wife replies “Oh are you, now?” this does not usually indicate a misunderstanding on her part of the proposed time-frame for his outing. On the contrary, it may just mean that the entire plan needs urgent revision, unless he wants to spend a night in the doghouse.

Of course, the word needn’t always be so loaded, regardless of sentence position. Sometimes, even in Ireland, a terminal “now” just means “now”.

An example I often use to highlight the nuance for visitors is an imaginary conversation between the poet WB Yeats and his wife. WB: “I will arise and go now” (non-sarcastic). Mrs WB: “Oh, will you now?” (sarcastic). Come to think of it, I’m nearly sure that exchange also illustrates the difference between a tense and a mood. @FrankmcnallyIT