Cuil may be "an old Irish word for knowledge", but those of us who learned the language more recently (like, say, in the 20th century) will recognise it as meaning "rear". I've even found a dictionary which indicates that this meaning comes from old Irish. In fact, the only references I can find to it meaning "knowledge" are the word-for-word ( Read more... )

Short description of news article in RTÉ's newsfeed: "A suspicious object ... turned out to be a hoax.". I'm picturing Michael Palin and John Cleese standing next to some sort of Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson device with cranks, tubing, maybe some steam, etc. "What's this?" "It's a hoax, innit", and so on.

...although how the Opposition could interpret the Taoiseach's "F-word" comment as directed at them I have no idea. Well, I do, but it'd be snarky.

Many Irish placenames are more-or-less phonetic renditions in English of the original Irish; there are a few commonly recurring words, such as Baile (town), Cnoc (hill), Átha (ford), Béal (mouth, as in river), Cill (church), Dún (fort), Lí(o)s (fairy fort), Droichead (bridge) and Gort (ploughed field). Thus you get Ballina, which is Béal an Átha, ( Read more... )

"Trial halted for legal reasons"

I imagine there are few other types of reasons that would halt a trial, really. There's a sort of coals-to-Newcastle feel about it.

Actually, I can't claim to have originated this. Somewhere along the line I picked up the word "fishslap", as in whacking someone across the face with a fish, a notional punishment applied via IM or other online chat for bad jokes, etc. When I wrote the office IRC bot for the company I worked for before my current employment, I included the ( Read more... )

Jurys Inn, Limerick, guarantees me that their website's price is the lowest.
We guarantee that for any hotel reservation made on jurysinns.com, you will not find a lower room rate publicly available on the Internet for that same room type in the same Jurys Inn on the same date requested ( Read more... )

The Fourmilab guide to using the apostrophe in English. (Bob's version is here)

Saw a promo for this on one of the big screens at the gym tonight: "America's Most Smartest Model". Actually, from that link I get the impression that the grammatical error is intentional (the "Most" is made to look like it's a pencilled-in correction, which isn't how it was shown on the promo I saw), but it's like the kid says on the Simpsons: " ( Read more... )

"The translations below are shown using both the Latin alphabet and the modern Irish script." (link)
Apparently "modern Irish script" still features the séimhiú (that would be a dot over a letter indicating it is followed by H), the ornate no-lowercase-for-us A, and a somewhat germanic-looking long S with no tail. I think someone needs to revise ( Read more... )