What it means
To shift someone means to snog them, proper teenage-style, usually on a night out or at a house party. It’s mainly kissing and making out, not the full hook up job. You’ll hear it in schools, colleges, and among adults who never really grew up. If someone asks who you shifted, they want the gossip.
Usage examples
"Did you shift anyone at the disco last night? I shifted yer man in the GAA jersey behind the smoking area. I was only a small bit locked."
"Did you shift anyone at the Coppers disco in Dublin last Saturday night? I shifted yer man in the Galway GAA jersey behind the smoking area just before two in the morning, I was only a small bit locked at the time, and his mate took my number on the way out."
"My cousin from Limerick spent the whole secondary school debs trying to shift the girl from biology class, finally caught her by the chocolate fountain at half eleven, the photographer got the picture for the yearbook the same evening, and the parents in the village were talking about it for weeks at mass."
Where it comes from
From the Hiberno-English shift in its older sense of move, change position or sidle up to, attested in Irish-English schoolyard speech from the nineteen sixties onwards as the polite-enough term for the teenage kiss at the parish dance. The verb crystallized through the nineteen seventies showband circuit and the parish hall discos of small towns in Galway, Limerick and Mayo, and survives intact in modern Irish life as the universal report-back word for the Saturday night at the GAA club afterparty or the college bop in Dublin.
Other ways to say it
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