When do things that need to be done get done in Ireland? Of course, in due course. Sorry, couldn't resist a migrant's favorite pastime: having a good laugh at the expense of stereotyping the host country. This particular giggle was triggered by a short email I just received which uses "in due course" twice to promise that stuff will get done, eventually. To me it is strangely reminiscent of a procrastinator's most loved Latin American Spanish word ahorita (right now), which is often used to refer to some unspecified moment in future.
As a good skeptic I decided to try to check if this expression is used disproportionately often by the Irish. OK I know Google hit statistics are notoriously unreliable and all that but that's a blog post, not a scientific paper, right? It's supposed to be for fun. Anyway below are my findings:
| Domain | course | "in due course" | "in due course"/course |
|---|---|---|---|
| ie | 1,920,000 | 103,000 | 0.0536 |
| uk | 48,900,000 | 2,150,000 | 0.0440 |
| nz | 2,570,000 | 38,000 | 0.0148 |
| us | 6,820,000 | 39,400 | 0.0057 |
I checked the frequency of "in due course" against the background rate of "course" in four mostly English-language domains. And indeed IE comes out top, with a proportion of "in due course" accounting for occurrences of "course" at 5.36%. It's closely followed by the British with 4.4%. Kiwis and USians apparently resort to this expression much less often.
And no, I will not try to say anything about the Irish national character based on this pseudo-study. Just wondering, when will swipe card access be enabled in our new postgrad area?
2 comments:
in due course!!!
*mumbles to self*
gee, what a bunch of impatient whining demanding sons of mothers, these foreigners...
Due course, aka D-day, was today. Now we're in a nice new space with big windows... I can see trees with some yellowing leaves and patches of blue sky between gray clouds.
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