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Tenalach and the Wild Geese: "Celtic" Mythbusting

Featured image: A popular (and highly inaccurate) Facebook meme misrepresenting the Old Irish word “Tenalach.” Are you ready, kids? (Aye aye, Captain!).I can’t hear you! (Aye aye, Captain!) No, it’s not time for Sponge Bob Squarepants! (sorry if I got your hopes up!). It’s time for an episode of one of my favorite pastimes: “Let’s Debunk the ‘Celtic-y’ Myth!” A reluctant authority When you…

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Rocky Mountain "Haigh" 2: Butte, Revisited

Featured image: Montana’s trademark big sky along the Montana Copperway Trail, Butte COVID changed everything. Well, at least it seems that way. Standing here at the crossroads of “The New Normal” and “Will Things Ever Be The Same?;” casually masking up to go into a crowded store or to let a worker enter the house, and counting the antigen tests in the medicine cabinet, sometimes it seems that…

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Paddy, not Patty

The big day is coming. Are you ready? The big day is coming — the day when people all over the world celebrate everything Irish. If you’re like me, you probably already know what you’re going to be wearing, where you’re going to be celebrating, and who (and what!) you’re going to be celebrating with. You’ve laid in a supply of Guinness (or — gack! — green beer!), and the craic is ready to start…

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The Saint and the Shamrock

It’s almost St. Patrick’s Day! Just about three weeks to go! Grocery stores, drug stores, and big box stores are awash with every imaginable shade of green now that Valentine’s Day pink has faded away, and products ranging from greeting cards to green ravioli vie for shoppers’ attention.As I mentioned in my post of February 28, 2024, Rising Roads and Other Rants and Ramblings, this is also the…

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Rising Roads and Other Rants and Ramblings

March 17 is almost upon us! St. Patrick’s Day is wildly popular here in the U.S. (we love an excuse to party!) and, by mid-February, you can hardly walk through a supermarket or drug store without being nearly smothered in green glitter. In fact, just about anything that can conceivably be tinted gets the green treatment — from bagels to beer, and even rivers and fountains. Even now, just a few…

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A Little Piece of...Oh Hell No!

For an American Irish speaker, it’s fun, and rather exciting, to find Irish in unexpected places. Well, usually. At least at first.It can crop up in all kinds of places — novels, jewelry, songs, TV shows and movies…even tattoos. Sometimes it’s even spelled right (or, in the case of a movie or a song, pronounced correctly) and says exactly what it purports to say. Sometimes.Often, though, the…

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Slán, a 2020

The year 2020 has been a rough one for all of us. Some of us have lost loved ones (more than 300,000 in the U.S. alone have died from COVID-19 as of this writing). Some have lost their own health. Many have lost their livelihoods or their homes. Most of us have had to cancel cherished and long-anticipated plans. We’ve all had to adapt to a “new normal,” and many of us have learned that people we…

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(The) Rest in Peace

(The) Rest in Peace

Of all the translation travesties out there, bad translations on tombstones and memorial markers make me the saddest. Someone wanted to honor a loved one or a respected individual with this ingraving, didn’t do adequate research, and now their heartfelt sentiment is a laughing stock on the Internet.

The really sad thing is that this particular translation travesty is all OVER the Internet(not…

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Welcome to the World of Welsh!

Welcome to the World of Welsh!

(Grumble grumble…this is my first time using the new WordPress editor, and I’m not a fan. Come on, WordPress! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!)

Ahem…That said, I have a very happy announcement to make: The Celtic Tattoo Handbook series has a new member! Here’s a big Irish fáilte to the much-anticipated Welsh Tattoo Handbook, the ultimate “think before you ink” guide to using the Welsh language…

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Live, Love, Huh?!

This language isn't a toy for you to use to make yourself feel "special" or "unique."

Haigh, a chairde!

I’ve been racking my brains lately, trying to thing of something to write about after six months of COVID hiatus. Adjusting to working from home  (yes, I have a day job), and dealing with the stress, worry, and day-to-day concerns really took their toll on the creative process.

Then, two days ago, I opened up Facebook and there, right in front of me, was this gem of a bad Irish…

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Lá 'le Pádraig Sona Daoibh!

Lá ‘le Pádraig Sona Daoibh!

A chairde,

It’s a crazy, different time in which we find ourselves! There’s nothing at all normal about this St. Patrick’s Day.

I don’t know how things are where you are, but I’m guessing not too different from where I am. Lock down. Pubs closed. Parades and masses canceled. Future events in doubt. Maybe you’re sitting home, as I am, wondering if you’ll even have a job a few weeks from now.

But…

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St. Patrick's Day and being Irish in the time of COVID-19

St. Patrick’s Day and being Irish in the time of COVID-19

So, a chairde, this is not the post I thought I would be sharing today.

For the past several weeks I’ve been working on a post on what it means to say “I’m Irish.” It’s something several friends on both sides of the question have asked me to address — why it is that Irish-Americans insist on referring to themselves as “Irish.”

It’s something that really bothers some people, and a culture clash…

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March Madness

Ah, spring! Flowers are blooming, birds are singing, St. Patrick’s Day is right around the corner, and ridiculously bad Irish T-shirts, memes, and posters are cropping up everywhere.

I’m not talking about the offensive, racist stuff one sees at this time of year, though there’s certainly plenty of that (Repeating for those in the back of the class: Things that portray Irish people as drunks, as…

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"I am," or Copulating in Irish

“I am,” or Copulating in Irish

Ha ha…made you look!

If you’re new to Irish, you may be wondering if The Geeky Gaeilgeoir has been hacked by a porn site (Don’t worry. It hasn’t). If you’ve been studying Irish for a while, you’re most likely either giggling or rolling your eyes (it’s an old, old joke).

This post is not X-rated, or even R-rated (though some of the language I’ve heard from people trying to sort out this subject…

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The Modest Preposition

A while back, I wrote a Facebook post lamenting the loss of the preposition “from” in the phrase “to graduate from college.” Apparently, in increasingly common usage, one no longer graduates from college, one “graduates college.” (There are lots of reasons why this oddly truncated phrase doesn’t work, which I’ll let Grammar Girl describe in detail. To me it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard.).

T…

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Oh, What an Idiom!

Oh, What an Idiom!

Definition of idiom (Thank you, Webster!)

1: an expression in the usage of a language that is peculiar to itself, either grammatically (such as no, it wasn’t me) or in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements (such as ride herd on for “supervise”).

2a: the language peculiar to a people or to a district, community, or class :DIALECT

b: the synta…

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A Cautionary Tale, or What to Buy Your Celtic-Loving Loved Ones for Christmas

A Cautionary Tale, or What to Buy Your Celtic-Loving Loved Ones for Christmas

Once Upon a Time…

Once upon a time, a young man decided to honor his heritage by getting a tattoo in the language of his people…

Alas, he put his faith in the internet and the results were, shall we say, less than optimal.

I really wish this were a fairy tale!

Truth in Advertising

The video above may be an advertisement (in fact,…