Áilín Quinlan: Falling in love with our native language, one word at a time

You know what, I thought with no small amount of pride, our forefathers had their heads screwed on.

I had just reached Page 18 of Hector Ó hEochagáin’s book An Irish Word A Day. Earlier this month, I’d decided to learn one word a night before bed.

I was keeping it up religiously, and even enjoying it, but then I came down with some version of the flu and that was the end of An Irish Word A Day for a while.

I did come back to it, but by then I was more than a few words behind schedule, so I cheated a bit and did two or three words per night over the next few nights to bring myself up to par with where I should have been.

The last page I landed on before I finally caught up with myself dealt with the phrase ‘rún a dhéanamh’, which is the closest approximation, according to Hector, that the Irish language has to the word ‘resolution’.

Our Irish-speaking ancestors, he says, didn’t have a word for ‘resolution’ because they knew that resolutions are a load of rubbish.

So, instead of focusing on January and stressing about a New Year’s resolution in terms of say, ‘Rinne mé rún le haighaidh na bliana nua dul go dtí an gym’ ( or, I made a resolution to go to the gym in the New Year), Hector believes we should be opening our minds to the simple things every day and seeking the beautiful in the ordinary.

It’s better for your health than any overpriced and underused gym membership, he says, adding that “you won’t have any trouble putting your boxers on”.

Ah now, what a great thing to read on a dark winter’s night when so many New Year resolutions are crashing and burning all over the place.

Wonderfully, the next page dealt with the word ‘amaideach’ which means ridiculous, and the next, and so beautifully, was ‘plúiriní sneachta’ which means snowdrops, a phrase I hadn’t heard since I was in primary school.

So many of these words are so incredibly lovely – take ‘dinglisí’ which means tickles... ‘an bhfuil aon dinglisí agat’ (have you any tickles) and ‘tearmann’ or sanctuary – Is é an gairdín cúil no thearmann (my back garden is my sanctuary.”

So Hector and all of these lovely words got me thinking, and I started to go through the pile of books on my bedside locker that I’d fallen away from as a result of getting distracted, being too lazy-minded or too tired to concentrate, or simply coming to bed too late to sit up and read and instead just listening to an audiobook on my phone.

I was staggered to see the wisdoms I’d been missing out on.

At the bottom of the pile was John O’Donoghue’s Anam Cara, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. I’ve had this book for some 15 years; it’s a sort of philosophical exploration of Celtic spirituality as well as topics like friendship, the soul, creativity and the natural world. I’d never finished it.

I found it again before Christmas while sorting through some bookshelves. Alas, as usual, although I diligently set it on that bedside locker, I was too tired, busy, distracted, lazy-minded, or simply coming to bed too late to sit up and read, so it ended up with other things on top of it.

Although I didn’t get beyond the section on friendship, there was wisdom aplenty here. Friendship needs a lot of nurturing, O’Donoghue says. We often devote our primary attention to the facts of our lives, to our situation, our work, our status, to the point that most of our energy goes into doing, he warns.

Yet, he observes, there is a deep value to true friendship to having a soul friend, or anam cara, or the Buddhist concept of the Kalyana-mitra, or ‘noble friend’.

A real friend will not accept pretension, but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness.

True friends fill out our inevitably partial vision of ourselves in a kind and critical way.

We can never be fully visually present to ourselves, O’Donoghue says, so our soul friend, our anam cara – and this could be a teacher or mentor - is the truest mirror to reflect our souls and reveal to us the full contour of our spirits.

Hmm, deep stuff and well worth pursuing. I resolved to give it another go. Next in the pile was Dr Maureen Gaffney’s Your One Wild And Precious Life. I’d read most of her earlier book, Flourishing, a few years ago, but I never really got to grips with this later one, named after a Mary Oliver poem.

The idea is that we all have just one life, one opportunity to live that life our own way, that we get no chance to rehearse any of it, and that we continually develop through our lifespan, be it 70 or 90.

Or, of course, it can be more than that, because given that most babies born since the year 2000 can expect to live to be 100 or older (to me, that’s a really terrible thought, but anyway) we should live and plan as if we will live that long.

A whole century? Perish the thought, but there you are, that’s modern medicine for you.

The real essence of our wellbeing lies in the sense that our lives are moving forward, Gaffney says, even if it’s not working the way we thought or hoped, the point being not to feel simply stuck.

And that’s only three of them.

I also have An Irish Folklore Treasury by John Creedon, which I have read most of, but want to finish, as well as Blindboy Boatclub’s Topographia Hibernia, which I never even started.

So, plenty to be going on with.

For now, anyway, it’s onwards into 2026.