I made two trips outside Galway, one to the biggest of the Aran Islands, where I cycled a total of 90 kilometres on my rental bike. The second trip was to the famous Irish folk music and dance festival in Ennis 70 km from Galway. Inishmore, the biggest of the Aran Islands, is 12 km long and only a couple of kilometres wide. The island is a meaningful place for Irish culture because of the Irish language, historical monuments and handicraft. Pupils from the mainland visit the island every year with the aim of practising the Irish language. Aran sweaters seem to be made of the sweetest wool I have ever touched. And the landscape: blue-greenish ocean beating up the cliffs or sweet white sand beaches, and in the middle of the island white houses are surrounded by stone walls, and lots of lambs roaming about. In some places you can find seals resting and starring at you with small dark eyes. Really, it is a place you have to go! The day before I left Ireland I took a bus to Ennis, a beautiful small town with streets and pubs full of musicians. On the main stage in the town centre, Irish music and dance schools showed 40-minute-long programmes of music, dances and songs. There were more than 40 groups from Ireland and some from England, the US, and Europe, too. This day in Ennis was a great finale to my trip to Ireland.
BREXIT VOCABULARY Ilmar Anvelt
Editor of OPEN!
Now when the Brexit negotiations are under way, it might be interesting to have a look at the linguistic influences of Brexit, as it has given rise to numerous word derivations and puns. The dictionary publisher Collins named Brexit the word of the year in 2016, ahead of “Trumpism” and “hygge”. Brexit has been seen as the most notable contribution of politics to the English language in the past 40 years, having proved “even more useful and adaptable” than Watergate (impeachment of US President Richard Nixon, after which the suffix -gate has been used for various scandals) (Flood, 2016). Tunku Varadarajan, in his article in Politico (2017), calls Brexit the “Mother of all Rifts” and presents a tongue-in-cheek alphabetic list of words related to Brexit. The list starts with A for Article 50, B for Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, C for David Cameron, the former British Prime Minister, who is called “the gambler who lost it all”. The letter Q stands for the Queen, “Britain’s top Brexiteer”. As elderly people and those with lower educational levels were more likely to vote for “leave”, the author calls her “a grandmother who didn’t go to university” and adds that “her demographic is almost 100 percent pro-Brexit”. We know that the Queen is supposed to be politically neutral, but on 9 March 2016, The Sun published an article headlined “Queen Backs Brexit”, upon which Buckingham Palace complained that The Sun had breached the Editors’ Code of Practice (Newton Dunn, 2016). On the contrary, the hat that the Queen wore when she opened the Parliament and laid out the government’s intention to deliver the eight bills necessary for Brexit (on 21 June 2017) was seen to express a pro-European attitude, as the hat “bore a strong resemblance to the European flag” (Ferrier, 2017). As the British tabloids (like the aforementioned Sun) were strongly anti-European, the paragraph under 18