How words often get killed off - Reclaiming a ‘donnybrook’

IN Brian Friel’s visionary play, Translations, he interrogates the challenges of communication across generations and cultures and he laments the incremental decline, and loss, of original language and metaphor and subtlety of meaning.

The playwright quotes the pragmatic assertion of Daniel O’Connell, ‘the Liberator’, from Kerry, that “the old language is a barrier to modern progress.”

Ireland has been a rich contributor to the world’s lexicon and has exported, along with its sons and daughters, thousands of words and phrases which are used rarely, if ever, in the increasingly urban, if not urbane, society that we have become. Some of them have never gone away.