Battrmaio?

The other day I was in a newsagents, browsing the newspaper rack, when a man approached the sandwich bar and asked for a roll.

"D'you want butter or mayo?" asked the Irish girl behind the counter.

"Eh, mayo please" replied the man.

My brow furrowed. Mayo? Have we always called it that?

Let me explain.

As many of my readers know, I used to live in Germany. The German word for mayonnaise is simply Mayonnaise, but everyone in Germany calls it Mayo (rhymes with "bio"). I presume Poles call it mayo too. I don't know, it's just a hunch. (Those two countries have quite a bit in common in many areas of their culture, including food. The German word for plate is Teller, in Polish it's talerz.)

So when I got back from Germany in 2007, I often heard Polish staff in delicatessens say "Battrmaio?" when someone ordered a sandwich. I assumed it was just their way of asking "Butter or mayonnaise?" and that they didn't realise that Irish people said mayonnaise, not mayo.

But this girl at the sandwich bar the other day was definitely Irish, and so was her customer. Yet they both said "mayo". Is this a Polish import? Have we had so many Polish sandwich bar staff over the past few years that we've picked up the infectious "mayo" from them? Or have Irish people always called it mayo as well as mayonnaise? I could swear I'd only ever heard it called mayonnaise before, but I could be wrong.

So have the Poles changed the way we speak English, or had I just not been listening properly all those years? Answers below please!