This will be a short post, because as I compose this, I have a little over 48 hours left here on the Emerald Isle and I have to cram about 72 hours in the time remaining. So, I’ll share with you this much. Ireland is a Napoleonic place: little island, big ambitions. I’ll give it that, now that I know more of its history.
See, unbeknownst to me, prior to my arrival here which lead me to an encounter with an island sized personal tour guide, raconteur and a knower of all things Irish, true or not, many in this land of the Gaels, claim to have a stronghold on English phraseology.
Remember the profoundly proud Greek patriarch, Gus Portokalos from the 2005 hit movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding? He’d tell anybody who’d listen how Greek was the basis of every word practically ever uttered by English speaking man and woman kind. He regarded it as a challenge.
My experience so far has (on one level), been a lot like that. I type that with endearment and an index finger.
After four days of in a comfy Mercedes Sprinter SUV and thanks to overly cautious stateside family members who glanced up and saw the words, “travel band” in close proximity to the words “Corona virus” on a truncated story on a CNN news crawl, we stayed up Wednesday night and most of early Thursday morning trying to discern what that actually meant to five Texas Americans currently loving their time in Ireland, I decided to stay in tonight (my now almost 61 year old body was giving me strong indications it would be in my best interests to do so), I did some fact checking. Turns out, a great deal of all the things these descendants of Celts have told told us was blarney. Okay, so a few Irish people have appropriated other cultures’ lexical histories. The “thievin’ royalist bastards” have been doing that to them for centuries.
So what? They’ve been an oppressed people.
Not only that, Bono claims to wear sunglasses in his waking life because of glaucoma and is largely disregarded by his own people. That and other pseudo facts and fiction will be in a much longer and far more bloated post, when nuair a fhillim ar Texas, and after about three days of correcting reverse jet lag.
Please come back next week. There will be photos, a video or two and perhaps a few potential lawsuits. I’ve seen things.
