Essay On Fish Ethnography

In what felt like a stumping search for something interesting to share about the uses of language in my family, I was reminded of an anonymous metaphor that easily relates to ethnography, “It is not the fish that discovers the water,” which recognizes the challenge of me as the fish to see the social world that surrounds me; ‘water’. Introspectively becoming that fish that does ‘discover’ the water that surround me in a socio-linguistic sense, I took a harder look at irregularities I had never before heard outside the context of my immediate family. Passed down from generations matrilineally: Great Grandmother, Grandmother and Mother alike have recited two distinct Irish rooted limericks and poems to me through the course of my life. As my great grandmother passed, G.G. (my mom’s Mother) and Jamie (my mom), continued the tradition at every family party, starting either one or both in a kind of …show more content…
It took me years to understand the meaning of this limerick, it was only after puberty I realized that it referenced a sexual nature to the short story of the ‘old lady’ and how she alleviated herself of the peculiar feeling. For this assignment, however, I researched the limerick and found an even naughtier variation that switches out the word ‘opened’ for ‘tickled’, and became immediately grateful for my matriarchal line to have shown sensitivity to my young ears. All the same, the performance of this limerick indexes a boisterous and inappropriate behavior involving alcohol long associated with the Irish as a community. As a dialect itself, the stigma carries its weight onto how the Irish are perceived as a people, and within the context of my family, which they still preformed with a lyrical implement of the typical Irish accent; ‘peed’ pronounced as the extenuated