Irish Slang – Crisps

Begorrah! Top of the morning!

Yes, two phrases you may have heard on Darby O’Gill and the Little People but that you will never actually hear spoken in Ireland. Most people have heard the Irish speak, but there are a lot of little things about their slang and turns of phrase that are often misunderstood by visitors.

Irish slang is definitely the thing that tickled our ears the most when we first moved here and that frequently tends to confuse our stateside guests. Below is the forty-first in a series I’m publishing of some common Irish slang that used to confuse us when we first arrived.

Crisps – Potato chips (see my entry on the Irish national Tayto).

Well, this slang list is handy for something, anyway – it makes me realise all the terms that I haven’t covered! When wifey and I first moved here we knew that french fries were called “chips,” but we weren’t sure what the term for potato chips was. Well, here it is: crisps.

In many ways, its much more accurate that the yankee “chip.” A chip is something off a plank of wood or a block – it’s not thin and . . . well, crispy. “Crisps” so accurately describes what one can expect from circular, thinly sliced discs of deep-fried potatoes that its a wonder people stateside continue to call them “chips.”