Patrick Cox

The Irish language is a joy not a burden: in what other tongue is a penis a wild carrot? | Una Mullally Record numbers of pupils are seeking opt-outs from compulsory learning. This is misguided – Irish is a portal to a world of imagination, says journalist Una Mullally

“‘Keeping’ and not ‘losing’ my Irish is probably the greatest gift I have given myself.”

Illugi Pétur Ágústsson þjóðhetja

When you register your name in the Icelandic phonebook you can choose to state your profession. And they have a pretty loose definition of what exactly a profession entails.

This person for example has opted for „þjóðhetja“. It means „National Hero“.

That here place looks lovely.

North Korean youth risk arrest for speaking like South Koreans North Korean authorities are doing everything they can to stop the spread of South Korean pop culture, or hallyu.

this is so sad if true. if nothing else it educated me about North Korea's draconian language policies www.dailynk.com/english/nort...

Opinion | Don’t Throw Your Dictionary Away

In which Orwell vigorously “responds” to Grammarly’s suggestions to “stay on-brand” and write “with A.I. prompts.”

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

Does the United States Need an Official Language? Donald Trump’s executive order succeeds where decades of right-wing efforts have failed.

The answer is no. But read the article, it’s good history. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Y'all! I am so happy you can hear this. It's one of the most amazing things I discovered while researching Bye Bye I Love You (and again thanks to @martenvandermeulen.bsky.social) and was so so moved by cellist Petronella Torin's recreation.

A big appreciation for @patricox.bsky.social as well.

Do You Think Differently in Different Languages? The brain’s response to information depends on language’s grammatical structure

Studies with results like these can be bunk, but this one is legit—which makes it super interesting.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

I firmly believe in not judging people's language use – because it's the right thing to do, yes, but also because I could never achieve the levels of saltiness of the 16th-century Flemish scholar Jacob de Meyere, who called French the 'scum of Latin'.

Old mobile phones and keyboards. Overlaid text reads: FT Exclusive: EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones to avoid espionage

Breaking news: The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage — a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China www.ft.com/content/20d0...

Essential reading, now also essential listening.

No self-winding phonographs! Radio's "liveness bias" started as a regulation, then turned into a business model that grew ever more absurd

Been working a long time on this one. Thanks to @niemanfoundation.bsky.social for granting me the time and space to finally start to understand why US broadcasting (and stepchild podcasting) is so weird! continuous-wave.beehiiv.com/p/no-self-wi...

What does WH Smith’s new high street name TGJones actually mean? New owner Modella says made-up moniker aims to evoke ‘sense of family’, but brand experts unconvinced

Such a terrible idea I thought it was an early April Fools story.

Irish English words added to the OED in its latest update: blaa, class, debs, ludraman, act the maggot, mineral, morto, spice bag www.oed.com/discover/new...

Thank you. (But not thank you to the BBC, which has chopped and changed its international platforms so much I’m sure it has needlessly lost listeners.)

In a Word...Patrick When I joined this newspaper years ago, I announced: ‘I am Patsy and by this name shall I be known heretofore. Hear ye me!’ And, lo, so it has been

Nice to share the name with yer man.

18 years on honeydude still rules.

I wrote an entire book on alphabetical order,* and
a) this never occurred to me; and
b) holy shit that's crazy.

*It's called A Place for Everything, since you ask, available in all good bookshops now.

This evening is the first public event for Bye Bye I Love You: a talk at Planet Word, the language museum in Washington, DC.

I'm excited to be onstage with Britt Oates, an anthropologist and manager of public programs at PW, who GETS IT.

planetwordmuseum.org/events/book-...

Help Denmark Buy California – Because Why Not? Buy it from Trump, the bigliest crowdsourcing ever

My Danish pals have written their own fork in the road email.
denmarkification.com

Concepts for Which I Suspect Germans Have a Single Word Dedicated to schadenfreude and fremdschämen - - - 1. The form of disappointment that accompanies realizing that the snowy egret you have fleetingly...

A sense of longing for that time between the wars when OK, the economy was shot and the newer politicians were creepy but we all put on too much makeup and danced till dawn to atonal music. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/con...

In bomb shelters and without power, Ukrainian Jews translate the Torah into their national language for first time When Oleg Rostovtsev hovered between life and death after a serious operation last April, he asked friends and family to do something that, until recently, had been impossible — to pray for him by rea...

Ukraine is the birthplace of the Hasidic Jewish movement and has deep roots in Jewish history stretching back more than a thousand years.

Yet until recently, crucial sacred texts — including the Torah — have never been translated into Ukrainian.

‘I just felt so much shame about being raised in the Irish language’ – The How to Gael podcasters on helping a generation discover a grá for Gaeilge Upon first meeting Louise Cantillon and Doireann Ní Ghlacáin, it becomes clear that I need to focus. It’s not that I expected to sit back, relax, and coast through our conversation, but I hadn’t antic...

Shame no more. This is Ireland’s top bilingual podcast. m.independent.ie/entertainmen...

Could you pass a Cambridge English exam from 1913? Three teachers sat - and failed - the first Cambridge English exam 112 years ago. How would you do?

"Correct" grammar was weird and not especially correct in 1913. Just like now.
www.bbc.com/news/article...

YouTube video by BobDylanVEVO Bob Dylan - Key West (Philosopher Pirate) (Official Audio)

Bob Dylan is unpredictable but I don’t think he is going to, um, update this line:
‘Key West is the place to go / Down by the Gulf of Mexico.’
youtu.be/G-oOCo1Y1bw?...

Pooja Bhatia · Diary: Leaving Haiti In 2015, for the first time, large numbers of Haitians made the seven-thousand-mile journey through South and Central...

‘In the US, the language of migration tends toward the hydraulic: surge, wave, pressure, influx. These terms cast human movement as a physical force rather than the outcome of decisions made across decades.’

Pooja Bhatia on Haitian refugees, from April: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Today on @literaryhub.bsky.social, my passage in AMERICAN OASIS about Ofelia Zepeda's legacy of preserving and teaching the O'odham language in Tucson and southern Arizona

lithub.com/were-not-liv...

Judge caught in a 1970s time warp calls a football fan’s racist slur ‘banter.’

A photo of the front of a bookshop. Above the shop windows, under the name of the shop is a quote attributed to Neil Gaiman. A man on a ladder is scraping Gaiman’s name off.

A friend of mine took this photo yesterday