Word: irished
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Author Honor Tracy calls it "double-speak, double-think"-the typically Irish form of banter that says one thing and means another. It has helped produce a race of verbally agile writers, politicians and pub crawlers. If McGill University Psychiatrist H.B.M. Murphy is correct, it is also producing a high rate of schizophrenia...
...second annual Conference on Schizophrenia, in Rochester, Dr. Murphy reported that the incidence of schizophrenia in the Republic of Ireland is nearly triple the rate of the disease among Irish in Canada and Northern Ireland. His conclusion: Irish doublespeak creates intolerable levels of ambiguity that help produce schizophrenia. Many researchers consider schizophrenia a genetic disorder, while others believe it is produced by cultural pressures. Dr. Murphy's view of the problem among the Irish goes down the middle: though schizophrenia probably requires a genetic predisposition, it is triggered more often where the Irish are unmixed with other races, less...
Like most analysts of Irish culture, Dr. Murphy (a Scot) assumes that Irish expression was shaped by nearly 800 years of English domination. "You get this very commonly in a defeated people where the new master never gets a straight answer," he said. "I would guess that doublespeak had something to do with the fact that the Irish family and community could not tolerate open hostility. It always had to be suppressed, and using double language enabled them to do it. For some, it is an enjoyable game. But for those with a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, there...
...Sunday in Indianapolis, and since then I've visited 14 cities and towns in four states and listened to Reagan do his thing at 31 rallies, fund raisers, press conferences, and town-hall meetings. He has quite a repertory of mother-in-law jokes, folk tales in an Irish brogue, farm stories involving cows and milk buckets, and by now I know them so well that I've even started to dream his opening jokes in my dreams-when I've had a chance to sleep, that is. My only casualty from this constant traveling, though...
...that puts many firms in a stronger position to expand. In addition, foreigners, worried about the political and economic uncertainties in Europe and elsewhere, are shopping in greater numbers to buy up or into American companies. For example, a U.S. crane producer, Time Manufacturing, recently sold out to an Irish auto distributor, and a Swiss pharmaceutical corporation is now dickering to buy an American food firm...