My poor American children do suffer somewhat from having parents who don’t quite speak the vernacular.
It’s rare that I encounter a word these days that I really just can’t find the American equivalent for, but I was pulled up short this afternoon when I found Mabel denuding the toilet roll of its paper in the bathroom halfway through a playdate.
“Stop messing,” I told her, exasperated.
“Is she making a mess?” her little friend asked me.
“No, she’s just … messing.”
I really couldn’t come up with the right word for what Irish people call messing. Messing about? Being mischievous? Up to no good? Cruisin’ for a bruisin’? No, I’m back to Dublinese there. In any given class at school there are the messers – everyone knows who they are and what it means. They’re not bad (or “bold”, for that matter); they’re just … exuberant.
“You speak English with an accident,” her friend told me.
That about covers it.
Mabel’s probably off the hook so…if there isn’t a word or phrase for it!
em, stop arsing around? Acting the maggot?
You’re not helping.
Brilliantly put… “you speak English with an accident” hehe I love it
No help to you at all on the alternative word for messing!
Ha “arsin around” immediately came to me too, or “acting the maggot”. I’ll now be awake later trying to think of the answer to this!
Hah, I feel like I was on the other end of this sometimes as a kid, since my parents weren’t from the part of the country where I grew up, and sometimes they said strange things as a result, and then I’d say those things at school and get made fun of!
Like most language problems, the devil is in the prepositions: M was “messing around.”