Darach O'Seaghdha: Motherfocloir

"This is a highly enjoyable book about the Irish language, a concept unimaginable to generations of Irish people who emerged from school with a little knowledge of grammar and a vocabulary that gradually withered as they never used the language in everyday life. Darach Ó Séeghdha, curator of the popular Twitter account @theirishfor, set out to 'build a palace from the rubble of everyone else's smashed expectations.' He writes for people who expect the Irish language only to be confined to subjects of no interest to them, for people who think that Irish doesn't belong to them and for those who say they can't remember a word of it. In each case he surprises us with witty, learned and strange observations about the origins of words, their meaning and their connections. This is 'a playground of language', as the author says: meditations on the meanings of Irish names, the strange spellings, the 'lost' words that have faded from use and those words and phrases that have no equivalent in English. This is a drily-humorous and deeply personal book. And it can be enjoyed by all lovers of language- any language."--book jacket.