Walking clears my head. Especially here, on the eastern lip of the Atlantic, the fresh winds gusting in over Galway Bay clear the cobwebs of editing and writing from my mind. When I need a break from work – from books, paragraphs, sentences, words, letters – I walk.
Sometimes, though, the letters follow me. This one gave me a proper surprise, almost glowing in the wet autumn ground:
15 Comments | 
Ireland, nature, personal, photography | Tagged: autumn, autumn leaves, climate, Galway, graffiti, Ireland, leaves, letters, mystery, nature, nature photography, personal, photography, Q, stencil, street art, walking, weather | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
At the Galway Film Fleadh this week I saw It Came From Connemara!!, a documentary about the great Roger Corman’s time producing films in the west of Ireland, specifically Connemara in Co. Galway – a short drive west of my adopted city. (Fleadh is Irish for festival or feast.)
It Came From Connemara!! – NSFW trailer here – is a fun, fond look back at that productive and sometimes controversial stint in the late 1990s and the lasting effects of Corman’s presence on the Irish TV and film industry. (The friend I saw it with worked there as an extra, and the audience included many of the crew from those years.)
17 Comments | film, humour, language, morphology, wordplay, words | Tagged: advertising, blends, Brian Reddin, Connemara, cult films, extreme weather, films, Galway, Galway Film Fleadh, horror films, language, monster movies, monsters, neologisms, portmanteau words, Roger Corman, sci-fi, Sharktopus, weather, wordplay, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Ireland has a curious expression whereby this weather is used to mean “these days”. It normally occurs at the end of a clause or sentence, though it doesn’t have to. It’s a very colloquial phrase, more often heard than seen. But it appears sometimes in speechlike prose, such as these examples from the Irish chatroom boards.ie:
(1) He’s a sad man this weather.
(2) what coolant temp are you logging this weather?
(3) Wouldn’t imagine their stock was exactly flying out the door this weather.
(4) Hi, anyone else struggling with tacky paint this weather?
18 Comments | dialect, etymology, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, metaphor, phrases | Tagged: aimsir, dialects, etymology, Hiberno-English, Ireland, Irish, Irish English, Irish language, language, language history, metaphor, metaphors, phrases, time, usage, weather, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
I’ll assume readers know that the ‘Eskimos have X words for snow’ idea is essentially a myth and a hackneyed journalistic trope. So I won’t elaborate on it here, except to note that the claim is so notorious in linguistic circles that it gave rise to snowclone, a handy term for this kind of clichéd phrasal template.
It turns out, though, that there are quite a few words for snow (and, OK, ice) in Scotland.* Ian Preston sent me a recent photo he took of an art installation in the lobby of the Cairngorm Funicular Railway, republished here with his permission:
21 Comments | art, dialect, language, nature, words | Tagged: art, Arthur Watson, Cairngorms, dialects, etymology, Gaelic, ice, Irish, language, language history, linguistics, meteorology, mountains, nature, oral tradition, Scotland, Scots language, Scottish, snow, snowclones, weather, words, words for snow | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 