weep Irish
To cry insincerely or in an exaggerated manner.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“Stop weeping Irish and tell me what really happened.”
“He likes to weep Irish whenever he wants more attention from his friends.”
“She started weeping Irish to get out of trouble, but everyone knew she was not actually sad.”
“The toddler began to weep Irish after his mother said no to the candy, but he stopped instantly when he saw a colorful toy.”
“The politician began weeping Irish during his speech, hoping the public would ignore his recent scandals and sympathize with his fake distress.”
The expression derives from the traditional Irish practice of hiring professional mourners, known as keeners, to provide extravagant displays of vocal grief at funerals. Such demonstrations of emotion were a formal requirement of the ceremony, ensuring the deceased was sent off with a degree of public sorrow that the bereaved might not have been able to sustain unassisted. The phrase remains a linguistic fossil of the social expectation that mourning should be both loud and outsourced.
Last updated August 10, 2026