muckefuck | March is Question Month... (Reply)

...but that never occurs to me until I start seeing calls for questions appear in Friends' journals. For me, March is always Irish Month. And, no, not simply on account of Lá Fhéile Pádraig. Nothing reminds me more of the stereotyped notion of "Irish weather" than the raw winds, chill humid air, and drenching showers of March in Chicago (a notion so brilliantly parodied in An béal bocht, where a freezing downpour comes to Corca Dorcha every night with such regularity that when our narrator finally stays the night somewhere without this, he finds it completely unsettling), particularly when coupled with the sudden greening of lawns and bursts of daffodils

I've even picked out my Irish novel for the month--heck, let me be ambitious and call it my first Irish novel of the month: Nuala O'Faolain's My dream of you. I was so deeply impressed by her Are you somebody? that hardly had I finished reading it but I sent it to my mother. And I was so eager to start her foray into fiction that I plunged into last night with still fifty pages to go in Zhang Wei's The ancient ship. (Which I highly recommend if you haven't already had enough of the horrors of recent Chinese history to last you a lifetime; I thought I had my own self but he convinced me otherwise.)

Since I understand many of youse are having a time of it coming up with questions to ask, I'll make this easy and volunteer to answer any and all question youse might have about the Irish (or Hiberno-English!) language. I'm not an expert in the area by any means (regardless what some folks on

linguaphiles might think), but I'm willing to go and harass actual experts until they tell me what I want to know. Now let me kick off the fun with a question for youse: Everyone knows, of course, that the traditional Irish greeting is "Dia's Muire dhuit!" or "God and Mary to you!" But who can be the first to tell me the meaning of this pious little phrase?: