it's the end of the craic!
http://snipurl.com/5g53

I notice that the article, while trotting out the rote ragnarok line that is most popular, studiously avoided talking to any representatives of those who work behind the bar in the pubs. The hospitality industry unions are, apparently, very vocal in their support for the ban, since it is their members who are working in smoke-laden air night after night. Norway is next, and NZ will follow suit by the end of the year.

Again, why not give a definition of "craic"? This is what
I found:
what the heck does CRAIC mean? Its a Gaelic word that means the humor of the time, a bit of fun. Like one says "I am going out for a bit a craic" means going out for a great time, good humor and fun. Its a very Irish expression.

tsuwm's wwftd has a good definition. Why didn't he post it?
craic
[Irish] /crack/ the combined sensation of good conversation, good company, good times etc.: great fun


The only thing that could make the Irish politicians ban
smoking if that they have been show an abundance of evidence
that the care of the 7,000 who die from smoking each year
costs an extremely large amount of money, out of the public
treasury.

That word always used to be spelled "crack", until at some point in the last few years somebody started spelling it as "craic", whether because they assumed it was an Irish word, or wanted to make it appear more "Irish", I don't know.

That word always used to be spelled "crack", until at some point in the last few years somebody started spelling it as "craic",
Well for heaven's sake--I wish they hadn't done that, for a very odd reason. I knew someone who bandied the word craic around with all kinds of fake knowledge: showing off, I felt. Had the word been crack, it wouldn't have gotten on my nerves so badly, because crack's not a foreign word to US'ns.

I must say I personally dislike the word in its "fake Irish" spelling. In an attempt to shed some light on the origins of the word, I googled "craic crack origin" and found the following URL:
http://www.sluggerotoole.com/home/archives/001985.asp
which contains a long, somewhat politicised but quite interesting discussion on the origin of this word.

Hibernicus, I hope you don't mind if I make your link clickable--this is really interesting! Note: to make a link clickable, in front of the address put [  ] with url inside the brackets; and at the end, put [  ] with /url inside them. Same for colors, italics, and bold: put the word or letter (click on "you may use markup in your posts", above) inside these brackets in front, and a /   preceding the word or letter in the brackets following. Say I want to make the phrase "you may use markup in your posts" blue. I would then put [  ]you may use markup in your posts[  ], with blue inside the first set of brackets, and /blue inside the second set. Okay:

http://www.sluggerotoole.com/home/archives/001985.asp
Practically the first thing I saw was what to me was a garden-path sentence: Actually, I was interviewed by Radio Foyle and Starrett carried the interview in the Newsletter !

He says: Given it remains in use in southern Scotland, northern England and parts of the Low Countries, and was in use in southern England too (in Spenser's poetry, for example), there is no reason to suspect any Celtic connection at all (and no reason to spell it 'craic').

One of the responders has: Talking of Skeat, he has the following for crack:

Crack (English) Anglo-Saxon "cearcian", to crack, gnash noisily. Cognate:
Dutch "kraken", to crack, creak; Greek "krachen"; Gaelic "crac", a fissure,
"cnac", a crack, to crack. Imitative, like crake, creat, croak, crash,
gnash, knock. Aryan root, "gark".
Is Skeat a dictionary?

Is Skeat a dictionary?

Well, Walter Skeat was a philologist , but his name is associated with two etymological dictionaries of English (still in print, I believe) published by Oxford UP. (I have a copy of the shorter one that I found for a couple of bucks at a flea market.) They're old, but nice. Today Aryan would be replaced with PIE (Proto-Indo-European). Here's what the 1911 <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica</em> had to say about Skeat:

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/S/SK/SKEAT_WALTER_WILLIAM.htm

Thanks very much for the advice, Jackie! I'll definitely know how to make a clickable URL from now on.

You may be a little mystified by the political aspect of the debate on that page. You see, on the one hand you have the Protestants saying that the word comes into English from Ulster-Scots (a dialect of English, or of Scots, or a distinct Germanic language, depending on whom you talk to). On the other hand you have Catholics saying it was adopted into English from Irish. Each side accuses the other of trying to "claim the word for themselves" in a bizarre form of one-upmanship. Even the existence of the Ulster-Scots language ("Ullans") is a political issue, with Catholics saying the Protestants are only pretending to have their own language to achieve "parity of esteem" with the Catholics (who supposedly own the Irish language). I have little doubt that we will end up with Catholics writing "craic" and Protestants writing "crack", to add to all the other shibboleths with which the people like to distinguish themselves from their neighbours.

If this all sounds a little silly to you, welcome to political discourse, North of Ireland style!

If this all sounds a little silly to you, welcome to political discourse, North of Ireland style!
I think politics must be about the same, the world over. Here, we have the did not/did toos...

Here, we have the did not/did toos...

Do not!