Mind, Tory, Puck - the history of Irish words still used today in modern English

This is quite interssting, but as children we ALWAYS called the national language IRISH or an Ghaeilge; we NEVER called it Gaelic (and those of us who were raised in rural areas called a spade a spade). Some frequently used Irish words and phrases in English are galore (go leor), plenty; slew (slua)a crowd; smithereens (smidiríní), fragments. Irish is still the official language of the 'independent' Irish state, but it is seldom heard in the Dáil. By and lage the high ranking clegy were indiffernt, if not hostile, to the Irish language. But there were a few noted exceptions. In the late 1980s Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich of Armagh and Church of Ireland Archbishop Donald Caird of Dublin frequently held conversations i nGaeilge. Níl inti ach leath náisiún tír gan teanga. (A country without a languageis only half a nation).

Please read the late Danny Cassidy's "How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads." A work of true genius, it's filled with amazing revelations. It's available on Amazon. I can't recommend it highly enough.

well written George and very plausible.

What about boycott?

Very speculative--and unattested--to derive "slob" from the Irish. There certainly are a group of words with slab- in Modern Irish, but that doesn't prove which words came from where. I'd suspect Anglo-Saxon or Norse. And what does O'Shea mean by citing "fleadh" and "ceili"? They're Irish words, they're not in English except as direct borrowings. What is most striking is that the Irish in Ireland almost never use words such as smithereens and galore. In fact there's very little influence of Irish in the English of Irish people, just a handful of features. But the weirdest claim in the article is that "mind" comes from Irish root. That's utter nonsense. Mind, we are told in the article, comes from Mionn, which is described as "an obsolete term for a type of ornament attested in Old English". So how does a word for an ornament come to mean the mind? What foolishness. Mionn in Modern Irish is an oath, by the way. I suspect if you go back to the Indo-European, words like "mind", Irish "meoinn", Latin "mens" all have a common root, but it sure ain't as described by O'Shea's pseudo-expert!