Not The Annoyingly Trivial Things-Bitches be cray cray week.

mikemac2 wrote: »

Man arrested by the Gord - eeeee

Much favoured by anyone who works for RTÉ

Where this is wrong is even more basic than pronunciation: as an organisation RTÉ frankly does not know the short-form name of the force. It's certainly not "The Gardaí", which means "The Police Officers". For some unknown reason RTÉ persist with using "The Gardaí" as the short form for An Garda Síochana. As a name it makes no sense.

The short-form for AGS is An Garda. Even calling the force 'The Garda' is better than calling it 'The Gardaí/The Police Officers'. But 'An Garda' is indisputably the correct short-form collective noun for An Garda Síochána. The garda = an individual garda; the gardaí = individual police officers (note: no capitalisation). It doesn't matter how often RTÉ or other journalists call it "The Gardaí". It really shouldn't be hard for any professional newsreader or journalist to get to grips with something this simple.

And does it say "Gardaí" on these cars? Of course not because it would be silly to write "Police Officers" (as opposed to Police) on a police car.

eisenberg1 wrote: »

"The man was arrested in Port Leesha"

On this, however, the few people who pronounce it like that in RTÉ are correct. Although a slew of people thanked that post, if they thought about it, the "Port Leesha" pronunciation is natural and makes sense. For instance, you wouldn't say "Bus Scoil" or "Mála Scoil", and even the dossers in Irish class instinctively know that: technically speaking, two nouns together result in the second noun being in the genitive case as we are indicating possession or a relationship of some sort. Thus, we all know it's Bus Scoile and Mála Scoile (similarly in English we wouldn't say 'Seán coat'; we would indicate the link by putting an apostrophe in: Seán's coat).

And back to Port Laoise, because that is precisely the correct spelling. It's two words, not one word. There is a connection between both nouns: the fort (port is an Old Irish word for fort) of Laois. There is no such place as "Portlaois", and the pronunciation "Portleesh" is wrong, no matter how often certain people might say it. It's wrong because it disregards a very ancient tradition, a huge pattern, of how to pronounce certain spellings.

The superb Logainm.ie website, where you can click and access digital copies of the primary source historical records connected with a placename throughout the centuries (Here, for instance, are 8 pages on the history of the placename Port Laoise), also has an excellent pronunciation guide. Here's the correct pronunciation entry for Port Laoise:

Port Laoise

Port Laoise, and like Scoile, Deirdre, Gráinne, Aoife, Ailbhe etc, when a word ends in an 'e' it has an 'ah' pronunciation. Again, every Irish person knows this but the ones who thanked that post criticising the "Port Leesha" pronunciation hadn't thought about it. So credit where credit is due to the RTÉ newsreaders in question for getting Port Laoise's pronunciation correct. To pronounce it otherwise is to disregard an entire pattern that has been clearly visible throughout the language for well over a millennium.

And, yes, it is Dún Laoghaire - not "Done Leery" - regardless of the irony of people ignorant of Irish sneering at Irish people who pronounce Irish names correctly in line with the above tradition. (pronunciation of Dún)

LexieOnRale wrote: »

It's actually called Portleesha a lot in the midlands!!

Correct, and rightly so.

My TA: people saying "amount of people/things/events/places" etc. It's a countable noun so it's number of people, number of things. Again, there are rules and traditions for that that should be respected. People inventing their own rules and sneering at people who go to the trouble of learning the established rules annoy me. The number of journalists who persist in saying "amount of people" etc is particularly depressing given that their entire trade deals with words, and precise meaning. Or at least it's supposed to. Amount versus Number Lastly, "begging the question" does not mean "posing the question" - no matter how many people think it does. It just doesn't. Me: "He's a gobshíte". You: Why? Me: He just is. That's an example of "begging the question".