(“What’s the story?” as Gaeilge–in Irish)

As I mentioned last week, I am in a new Irish class at Gaeltacht Minnesota, with a different instructor, Kia, who does some different things. I have no problem with these, and I think I am adjusting OK. However, some fine-tuning may be needed.

One of the things that Kia does is ask each of the students to come up with a sceal(story):

Every week, we share a sentence or short paragraph about something that happened during the previous week. The idea is that we want to be able to use our Irish to communicate and this is our opportunity to practice that. Corrections are rarely made at this time since the purpose is simply communicating as Gaeilge and getting comfortable using what we know. These don’t have to be lengthy or fascinating (or even true).

She explained this last week, so I had fair warning. However, I probably should have been listening more closely to the scéalta her other students had contributed then.

So yesterday I was wondering what should be in my sceal. I quickly remembered something I had written a few days ago, but did not think it was enough–I had remembered “short paragraph” but forgotten “a sentence”. So I added a little more, based on some suggested phrases Kia had provided. Then I stretched it a some by some agus (“and”) clauses. When I had six lines of handwritten text (my handwriting is not small) I figured it would do.

As you have probably guessed, this was longer than what anybody else had contributed. Even the students who had been in Kia’s class for many months just had a short sentence or two. So as not to look like an excessive overachiever I glanced over my paragraph to see if I could shorten it. Complete blank: My Irish skills have a long way to go before I can edit under pressure. And pressure there was: Kia was looking at me and the other two newbies present (attendance was way down because of the weather), expecting one of us to contribute something. Well, somebody had to uphold the honor of the new students , so I went ahead and read what I had put together. Really quite embarrassing.

I don’t think I did anything special. All I did was piece together three sentences plagiarizing modeling them on examples we had been given. I doubt there was an original thought anywhere in the paragraph. Having a degree from a liberal arts college and a quarter century of experience in large bureaucracies, I am accustomed to cranking out English text as needed, especially when freed from tiresome restrictions about creativity and originality. The best I can now claim is that I may have a talent for BS in more than one language.