This past weekend I attended a Lá Gaeilge and, as I was having library hold fatigue, decided to take a break from my library books and read one of the books I had picked up at the last La Gaeilge in January: Darach O’Seaghdha’s Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not-So-Dead Language. Darach is perhaps best known for running the ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theirishfor account on Twitter back when Twitter was still a) Twitter and b) sort of usable.
This was an odd little grab bag of a book but it did what it was supposed to do, which was be fun. Irish has a reputation in Ireland of not being fun, or at least it did until quite recently, when the Second Gaelic Revival started, of which Darach’s Twitter account and his podcast, also called Motherfoclóir, have been important parts. Kneecap is another part of it which is why this book paired so well with rewatching the Kneecap movie on Saturday. Anyway, the book has some commentary and linguistic history of the language itself, some personal essays about Darach’s relationship with it as a child with Gaelgeoir parents back during the Celtic Tiger years when the language was deeply uncool, and a lot of vocabulary lists in various degrees of utility. (They are not intended to be useful; they are intended to be interesting.) I don’t know if this book made my Irish any better (I have other books for that, which I should use more) but I certainly enjoyed reading this and it was a nice break from both Duolingo and the self-imposed tyranny of my reading schedule. It makes me want to relisten to the whole Motherfoclóir podcast back catalog.
theirishfor account on Twitter back when Twitter was still a) Twitter and b) sort of usable.This was an odd little grab bag of a book but it did what it was supposed to do, which was be fun. Irish has a reputation in Ireland of not being fun, or at least it did until quite recently, when the Second Gaelic Revival started, of which Darach’s Twitter account and his podcast, also called Motherfoclóir, have been important parts. Kneecap is another part of it which is why this book paired so well with rewatching the Kneecap movie on Saturday. Anyway, the book has some commentary and linguistic history of the language itself, some personal essays about Darach’s relationship with it as a child with Gaelgeoir parents back during the Celtic Tiger years when the language was deeply uncool, and a lot of vocabulary lists in various degrees of utility. (They are not intended to be useful; they are intended to be interesting.) I don’t know if this book made my Irish any better (I have other books for that, which I should use more) but I certainly enjoyed reading this and it was a nice break from both Duolingo and the self-imposed tyranny of my reading schedule. It makes me want to relisten to the whole Motherfoclóir podcast back catalog.