“Avoid Taking Shite or Being Told to Feck Off”
- Rationalize that the first Guinness you drink will provide you a “meal in a glass,” leaving your stomach impervious to more alcohol.
- Order a “Black and Tan” instead of a “half and half,” fanning the flames of ancient animosities toward 1920’s British recruited Black and Tan constables.
- Blurt “Faith and Begorrah,” as if you use the expression when sober.
- Sport a “Kiss my ass, I’m Irish” pin.
- Act pompous, like a Limey with a shillelagh up his ass.
- Reach for your Guinness when it’s still settling on the bar.
- Perform “Danny Boy,” fronting the pub’s “Black Velvet Band.”
- Claim the Irish Rovers are, like Irish Setters, another dog breed.
- Mispronounce SLAINTY as SLANT-TEE when toasting.
- Malign Irish traditions such as Claddaghs, Celtic Crosses, and Trinity Knots as peasant wear.
- Mimic Irish dancers, bouncing rigidly on your barstool with arms folded over chest.
- Expect concise restroom directions when asking, though real Irishmen intermix stories and landmarks, often with no clue about destination, when offering any direction.
- Criticize the corned beef as a less expensive, fatty cut.
- Imply soda bread consists of soda water.
- Pontificate you’d send dry cleaning to the Magdalene Laundries if you lived in-country.
- Tell a colleen you’ve kissed the Blarney Stone, foreplay to asking her to kiss your rocks.
- Joke Barack Obama is Black Irish, without the apostrophe and Spanish heritage.
- Run the word “shite” inappropriately off your tongue in conversational exchanges.
- Jest that Irish Faeries and Little Folk are gay and height-challenged.
- Refer to any two Irish siblings as Irish Twins.
- Try to turn an allusion to the Virgin Mary’s Knock Shrine into a knock-knock joke.
- Question whether the cod in the fish and chips had been sustainably fished.
- Request Bushmills, “the Protestant shit,” as Jimmy McNulty, a character in The Wire preferring Jameson’s, avowed
- Make too easy jokes when ordering Red Breast shots.
- Remark that a St. Brigid’s Cross resembles a swastika.
- Opine that Irishmen who you’ve met in America prove snakes WERE in Ireland.
- Tell sheepishly inappropriate Gaelic kilt-and-sheep jokes, as mean-spirited as the reversed Rolling-Stones-Get-Off-Of-My-Cloud-lyrics turned into a Scottish punch line: “Hey, McCloud, get off of my ewe!”
- Clarify St. Patrick was a Brit.
- Give the finger to your Irish seatmate extolling the virtues of Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic The Banshees of Inisherin.
- Contend Joyce, Yeats, Wilde, and Shaw were incomprehensible local writers.
- Spell Erin “Aaron.”
- Try pronouncing Siobhan, Saoirse, Laoise, or Caoimhe and then laughing at their spelling.
- Liken your personal “troubles” to the thirty-year, late 20th Century Northern Irish conflict.
- Offer leeringly that Waterford Crystal is just “another piece of glass.”
- Call Derry “Londonderry.”
- Imply uilleann pipes aren’t the only thing Irish Pipers blow.
- Contradict a heart-touched, alcohol-fueled Irishwoman’s boast he had a sainted mother, granny, or teacher.
- Whimper about not getting green beer.
- Assume “Lost Six” refers to missing beers rather than the six of Ireland’s 32 counties still under British rule.
- Remind patrons the Irish have never finished better than 8th in soccer’s World Cup.
- Profess that Richard Nixon made a better U.S. President than JFK.
- Mistake shouts of “up the I.R.A.” as being about retirement accounts.
- Affirm the North’s Rory McIlroy is English and not the Catholic son of County Down he boasts as his roots.
- Assert that Bono, Van Morrison, and the Dubliners’ Ronnie Drew were the “3 Irish Tenors.”
- Brag you’ve never seen “Riverdance,” live or on any media.
- Detail the Aryan Brotherhood’s American Irish prison roots.
- Try fooling the object of your flirtation by playing “She loves me; she loves me not” using a three-leafed shamrock.
- Suggest the Chieftains should have ditched flutes, tin whistles, harps, and bodhrans to play rock-and-roll.
- Equate Irish cream or butter with anything sexual.
- Label John Lennon, and even Ringo Starr, more influential Beatles than Paul McCartney and George Harrison, baptized Catholics with Irish ancestors.
