A small phrase I used here recently attracted the curiosity of at least one reader who hadn’t heard it before.
The context was a country wedding that involved an Irish dancing competition for several guests chosen at random. All were good, I said, but the performance of one woman “took out”.
This was in specific reference to her having done several high-kicking laps of the hotel diningroom, thereby turning the dance-off into a sort-of Irish Olympian event: Riverdance and the 400m hurdles combined.
More generally, whenever I say that anything or anybody “took out”, I mean they were remarkable in some way. It’s a common figure of speech, I thought. But now, not for the first time, I’m wondering if that’s just me.
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Extensive searches in the archives have failed so far to turn up even a single corroborating example of the usage I have in mind. That’s partly because the phrase is so short and has so many different possible meanings in English.
Type “took out” in any search engine and, unfortunately, it will throw up a bewildering range of results.
Among the things you’ll find that have been took or taken out are “insurance”; “a super injunction”; “the trash”; “Irish citizenship”; “the reigning champion, with a vicious left uppercut”; and, in one especially traumatic headline, “a cousin’s eye”.
But in the sense of the phrase as I use it, there is never an object. The thing mentioned doesn’t take out anything. It just takes out (although usually in the past tense).
There is broad support for the concept in Terry Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English, which notes that in Irish speech, the word ‘out’ is used in “various non-standard verbal formations”.
We say “give out”, for example, where other English speakers say “chide”. We say “slept out” instead of “overslept”.
We also use “out” as an intensifying adverb after certain adjectives, eg: “happy out”, “hardy out”, etc. And, according to Dolan at least, we say “the divil and out” when we mean, well, “the divil and all”.
But on things that just “took out”, like the dancer at the wedding, his dictionary is worryingly silent.
So is Patrick Weston Joyce’s English As We Speak it in Ireland (1910), although that has several other local forms of ‘out’, including “from that day out” (meaning “from that day on”), and “be off out of that” (“go away”).
Joyce also mentions the Irish concept of being “out” with someone, meaning you don’t speak to them any more.
This is not to be confused with the modern concept of being “out” with friends (for a few beers, perhaps). It is especially not to be confused with the concept of being “out out” with friends (a condition that may last the whole night, or several).
To recap this last lesson briefly for any readers who may be still learning Irish-English, the thing to remember is that you would never be out – and especially not out out – in the modern sense with someone you were out with in the traditional one. I hope that’s clear.
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Another condition perhaps unique to Ireland is that of living “out the road” from somewhere. I know many people who live out the road from places. But paradoxically, I’ve never heard of anyone living in the road.
Perhaps that is a corollary of De Selby’s theory (from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman) whereby certain roads are essentially one away and to travel them in the wrong direction invites misfortune.
Another kind of “out” I seem to recall from Irish history books, meant to be in rebellion. Specifically, when Hugh O’Neill was said to be “out” in the 1590s, it didn’t mean he was in the pub drinking – it meant he was at war with England.
Or if not, he was subject to being called “in” (to Dundalk or somewhere else within the Pale) to explain why he’d had that lead he was given for a new roof turned into bullets, or whatever.
Then again, I also have a distinct memory that a newly appointed British Northern Secretary some years ago expressed excitement at the prospect of being sent “out” to Northern Ireland.
Maybe that’s general Foreign Office Speak for overseas postings. It may also have been in keeping with the convention whereby graduates of Oxford or Cambridge are said to go “down” from there to post-college life.
You can imagine that ambitious Oxbridge types arriving in Belfast – particularly during the Troubles – would have considered themselves both down and out, all right.
Getting back to things that just “took out”, I thought Dinneen’s Irish-English Dictionary might back me up. It doesn’t. Under amach, interestingly, it says that síos amach can mean both “down in the country, far down” and “up north”.
But again, there is no sign of the sentence-ending superlative “took out”. So now I’m starting to doubt whether this is a recognised phrase at all. Perhaps other readers – especially those from “síos amach” – can reassure me.
