by Jamie Chavez | Mar 12, 2018 | Words & Language
The day the Irishman was born, his mother watched the St. Patrick’s Day parade from her room in the Rotunda Hospital overlooking O’Connell Street and the Parnell monument. I’d love to be in Dublin for this parade, although they say some of the best St. Patrick’s Day...
by Jamie Chavez | Mar 20, 2017 | Words & Language
We’ve got exciting times goin’ on here in the good ol’ US of A, with one political party making some pretty interesting claims and the opposing party reacting with outrage. (See how I did that?) My Irish immigrant husband has spent hours watching debates and newscasts...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 12, 2016 | Words & Language
We’ve had a drought here in the American South. It stopped raining in early August and didn’t start again until early December, after the irrigation system had been turned off for some weeks. So it seemed only appropriate to republish this post from 2012—a sort of...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 3, 2016 | Words & Language
Words—and the way they are pronounced—can be such funny things. And people are often passionately attached to their own interpretation, even if they’re … well … wrong. (Like the pronunciation of Van Gogh. Look it up; you may be surprised.) The Irishman and I have done...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 3, 2015 | Words & Language
Consider for a moment the effects of being asked to change the language you use. … Brian Friel’s play Translations, written in 1980, depicts this in an Irish setting. The action takes place in County Donegal in 1833: we follow a detachment of English soldiers who are...