In Search Of The Craic

Music.

Who knew that the great country of Canada is named for a mistake? How about "bedswerver," the best Elizabethan insult to hurl at a cheating boyfriend? By exploring the delightful back stories of the 250 words in Wordcatcher, readers are lured by language and entangled in etymologies. Author Phil Cousineau takes us on a tour into the obscure territory of word origins with great erudition and endearing curiosity. The English poet W. H. Auden was once asked to teach a poetry class, and when 200 students applied to study with him, he only had room for 20 of them. When asked how he chose his students, he said he picked the ones who actually loved words. So too, with this book — it takes a special wordcatcher to create a treasure chest of remarkable words and their origins, and any word lover will relish the stories that Cousineau has discovered.

People That Don't Exist Are Citizens Of A Made Up Country is an exploration of family emigration in the context of global migration. It seeks to display the increasingly universal reality of displacement as a lived experience. In a sequence of interlinked chapter essays migrant reality is married to one family's history.

With 700 pubs in Dublin alone, the Irish have no shortage of places to enjoy a pint of the black stuff. Guinness is very big business. Distinctive black delivery trucks scurried around the city carrying large kegs to the pubs. Advertisements were played regularly on TV. There were large posters on bridges, buses and billboards everywhere. In Dub...

Ireland and its inhabitants have often been described as being ‘sports mad’. As a relatively small geographical entity, Ireland, north and south, has produced a disproportionately high number of world class sports men and women who have excelled at the highest levels of their chosen sport. The significance of sport in Ireland though extends far beyond the achievements of such individuals. Sport has historically assumed a centrality in the lives of the island’s inhabitants, a fact that can be measured by the numbers and commitment of participants as well as the emotional and financial investment of fans. This book seeks to address the ways in which Irish aptitude and ebullience for sport has manifested itself in those parts of the world that have or have had relatively large Irish communities. The first part of the book explores the diffusion of Gaelic games to a number of centres of Irish immigration and examines the social, economic, political and psychological impact that these games had in helping the Diaspora adjust to life in what were often inhospitable environs. The second part of the book extends the analysis by examining the contribution of Irish sports men and women to the sports culture that they encountered in their new homes and assessing the ways in which their involvement in these sports allowed them to come to terms with and make their way in their new locales. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal, Sport in Society