Irish Language Blog

(le Róislín) Listening to the news (an nuacht) recently, it struck me how many set phrases there are, where you can almost predict what the next word in the phrase will be, like an associations test in psychology.  The difference for our matching game in this blogpost is that these are all fairly predictable, and…

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(le Róislín) In the most recent blogpost (nasc thíos), we looked at several Irish words for “mess,” inspired by thinking about the phrase “dog’s dinner,” which can either mean “food for dogs,” literally, or “a mess.”  And that was inspired by listening to some radio commentary about Brexit (and btw, do you remember the Irish…

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(le Róislín) I recently heard some commentary on the radio equating the plans for Brexit (Breatimeacht) with a dog’s dinner.  And that got me thinking about another use of caint fháthchiallach / mheafarach, since we talked about the issue in the latest post (nasc thíos). Although “dog’s dinner,” as such, is not a traditional metaphorical…

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(le Róislín) In the most recent blogpost (nasc thíos), we did some discussion of noses (sróna) and grindstones (clocha líofa), which led to an interesting vocabulary work-out.  In today’s post, we’ll actually look at some more traditional ways of saying “to keep your nose to the grindstone,” none of which mention noses or grindstones.   This…

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(le Róislín) So what’s the connection between the four Irish terms in the title of this blogpost, most of which were introduced in recent posts (naisc thíos) Well, first let’s translate the title, and that will make some of it clear. sróna, noses próboscais, proboscises.  By the way, I did look in several Irish dictionaries…

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