Irish Slang - Your one

old Irish man laughing So you speak English. Why not travel to the land of saints and scholars where English has been lyrically embellished since the dark ages; a week or two in Ireland and I won’t even need a translation dictionary!

A few weeks of hearing your language dancing gracefully and coherantly across the Irish tongue might be more challenging than you think! Ireland may be a predominately english-speaking nation, but the thing that tickled my ears the most when I first moved here and that tends to confuse our stateside guests is some of the slang. So, below is the seventeenth in a series I’m publishing on some common Irish slang that used to confuse us when we first arrived.

Your one - A woman the speaker is pointedly referring to.

Related to last week’s “your man,” phrase, Your one is something Irish people say when referring to a woman who has irritated, astonished or otherwise made herself the pointed object of their attention. There is, as far as I know, no special reference for a man similar to this in the Irish vernacular. A casual reference to a female in the third person would be “your woman,” but if the third party female deserves special attention, she becomes “your ONE!”

For example, an Irish person might be describing a quarrel thusly:

“So she and her boyfriend got in a huge row. Well, your one stood up in front of the whole pub and threw his pint over him!”