I think this is my favourite so far. Alice Knox in Blackrock, Co. Dublin who is very glad to be single. #1926census
nationalarchives.ie/collections/...

Love this thread! I think it’s the rich creative space between the text and the reader, where we project so much of ourselves as readers and don’t even realise we’re doing it. Lately I’ve come back to a number of faves and realised *oh that’s why I liked it*.
It’s often more about me than the text.

Pachyderm is a magnificent word for rhyming and Disney’s dumbo did it (first?) with this earworm in 1941:

I can stand the sight of worms
And look at microscopic germs
But technicolor pachyderms
Is really too much for me

Contents page of report on countering enshittificatiom

Here's a link to the website for the Norwegian campaign against enshittificatiom, and below is the table of contents of the associated report: www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree/

Brilliant analyse by Jen Keane: I’d love to integrate this in a gender & public policy class…

Imagine if we could have such an impact with our bicycles…

Financial Times issues a correction that defines an era.

And the IT has una mullally, Patrick freyne and mark O’Connell. Insofar as either paper has an editorial line, it’s: we’ll publish anything that makes people argue on the internet, or generates clicks. Examiner has mick both-sides Clifford. It’s just click all the way down

Ah! Sorry to hear this 🥲
Here in Ireland we get barely any weather and still do nothing but complain about it… bracing for storm Dave as we speak 💨

I’m guessing Jane she’s been doing it multiple times to multiple people every year for decades.

Truly, she is a master of the wind up and I was properly up-wound.

I’m sure I told you this before, but Alice Mary also landed the most epic April fool on me. I was chair of the union committee at the ngo where we worked, and she phoned to say that management were introducing a pay increase for people with foreign language skills - but it wouldn’t apply to Irish!

Employers should cover work-related travel and other expenses directly rather than require employees to float their employer an interest-free loan while subjecting them to a byzantine reimbursement process that will take at least a month and entail multiple rounds of paperwork.

Ah, so many things going on here! So there’s capitalism playing its shiny valueless tricks; there’s centuries of accumulated emotional baggage; and there’s a minority language, struggling to compete with Anglo hegemony. Truly, you are doing the lords work and I’m grateful ❤️🇮🇪

…. Although, another way of looking at at this is that the gaeilge briste approach continues hacking away at building pride in the language without actually building skills, which is to my mind what got us into this situation in the first place.
So on reflection, you’re right (of course) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You cant achieve fluency through vibes. But you also cant achieve it if you’re entangled in anxiety and shame.
Going forward, if we could just impart languages to build confidence & competence and communication, that would be really great…

A lot of people disengage because they were raised with a pride in their national language - and a corresponding sense of failure at not learning it. These complex emotions need to be undone - the influencers are part of that.
Meantime, proper language learning needs to be available. +1

Can I suggest that the influencers you critique are addressing a different problem to language learning per se, and that both are necessary?
I think the gaeilge briste trope is responding to the individual & national shame that suffuses the relationship many have with the language. +1

Very good article, on the nexus created by media coverage of legal cases in the UK.
Nicely maps some of the ways that a broadly trans-inclusive society got reshaped into one of the most trans exclusionary places in Europe.

Excellent thread, sharing to bookmark.

If you’re interested in how sporting organisations assign sex, and the many problems with this, this short piece is an excellent primer and usefully clarifies the trans-obsessed spins in the msm.

Let’s do this Ireland… 🇮🇪⚽️ #COYBIG

Announcement on Galway-Dublin train: arrival time 8.00
This is a message for the passengers in coach B holding the doors open. You’re delaying the train, we all want to get home to see the match. To the passengers in coach B, we want to watch the match!
#COYBIG

Sharing to bookmark

The NYT style guide

"The Islamists oppose women getting an education," I mutter, as I aim my missile at the girls school

EU moves closer to creating offshore centres for migrants and asylum seekers MEPs vote to allow people to be deported to places they have never been to, as NGOs express fears over new ‘safe third countries’ list

I cannot wait to see the hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against this in EUrope's streets.... 🙄

@rinewithoutacat.bsky.social bit of Irish humour just for you

Celebrate Jennifer Johnston Her family, authors of this petitition, and those who admired her tremendous body of work and passion for life would like to see her celebrated  as a woman writer, all  too neglected, and as...

Celebrate author Jennifer Johnston!
Jennifer died last year at the age of 95 and her family have asked renowned sculptor Rowan Gillespie to memorialise her. They'd like to place the statue overlooking Sandycove Bay where she swam daily but the Council need persuading. Please sign & repost
@uplift.ie