While officially in Ireland we may have only two languages, in truth is it is probably closer to three: English, Irish and Irish-English. And it is this third language, Irish-English, that most of us on our fair island now speak.

Irishisms examines many of the words and phrases that colour this unique language and in doing so attempts to shed light on all the wonderful ways we have for saying how average we are, what we really mean when we say sorry, how to describe your level of insobriety, the difference between a wagon and a weapon and when awful is better than savage.