I'm Irish, so I speak Hiberno-English. After the company I worked for was acquired by a California startup my new boss wanted to welcome this new Irish contingent. At the tail end of a keynote speech he delivered at our first off-site he uttered the phrase "build great shite".
He tried to put an Irish slant on things, except the word shite only has negative connotations, it is not a general substitute word like shit can be.
In reverse, I wonder how well known Irish and British slang is in the USA: “Bumming” can mean to obtain or make use of something that belongs to someone else by begging; “fag” can mean cigarette; “for the craic” (“craic” pronounced “crack”) is “for fun”.
(And thanks to the very early part of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, I also know that an archaic meaning of “glory hole” is a cupboard for miscellaneous items, and the etymology of the sexual reference is that both are where you put your “junk”).
I think it's an American English dialect thing. I'm from Ireland, a dialect close to British English, and always found it odd when they say it on US TV
Taking the Mickey Bliss -> Taking the [censored for fear of turning up in the top 17% of vulgar HNers] --> related to it being slang for being Irish? Maybe not then.
> I'm not British so I can't speak to local usage but I have never seen that usage online
It's a _little_ old-fashioned, but in fairly common use. Probably in more common use since the ascension of its namesake; it makes for a particularly obvious joke for comedy writers.
“Great” also doesn’t help in this case, since in Hiberno-English (at least to my American ear) it sounds emphatic, not descriptive—that is, “shite” = “shitty stuff”, “great shite” = “extremely shitty stuff”.
Now that is an interesting usage.
I take it as using "crack" in an expansive sense of "company" rather than simply "news" or "gossip"?
(Possibly something which may confuse non native speakers of English.)
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