Today is, of course, every alcoholic’s favourite non-holiday, which essentially seems to involve drinking vast quantities of beer while wearing something green and speaking with an outrageously bad Oirish accent. No doubt the good people of Ireland find all of that malarkey wildly stupid and offensive, but nobody has bothered asking them for their opinions since the Great Potato Famine, so we’ll let that slide.

I am actually personally quite fond of the Irish. I like their rather… odd ways of doing things. They are QUITE different from the other cultures of Europe – not least because their language makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.

This is an oddity among languages, from what I have seen and experienced.

In Russian, the letters line up perfectly with the sounds you make when pronouncing them. There are NO diacritical markings, no accents, no variations whatsoever. An Uzbek, a Tajik, or a Mongol can look at the Cyrillic alphabet, and pronounce Russian words almost identically to an ethnically Slavic Russian.

The same is true of Japanese. The letters and the sounds associated with them have no variations whatsoever.

Chinese and other similar tone-based languages are a bit weird, because of course you have to worry about the tonal variations involved, but you can sort of work your way past that.

English is strange due to – among numerous other batshit crazy things about the language – the ways in which certain letters became hard or sibilant consonants, depending on the use case – “circumstance” is a great example. But, with enough practice, you can kind of sort of get it.

Gaelic, though… that is just nonsensical.

And then there is the Irish accent. What you hear in everyday life is… shall we say, the tame version of some of their regional variations in that lovely burring accent of theirs:

The Brits argue you need a passport to go to Ireland, for VERY GOOD REASON. It is a little like how northerners from the US claim that people from Alabama come from a different country. Well, they do, as a matter of fact – it’s just that they never quite got around to separating properly, and had the issue decided for them, rather forcefully, back in 1865.

Anyway – seeing as how this is about St. Patrick’s Day, perhaps we should close by celebrating the reasons for the holiday itself:

And we’ll raise a proper Guinness to that:

I will get a lot of crap for this in the comments, but I will say, I am quite partial to a good, proper, PUB-POURED Guinness myself. (The stuff from a can is nowhere near as good.)

That said, there is another Irish export that I quite enjoy, and this is GENUINELY and PROPERLY Irish:

Yep. That’s the GOOD stuff. Don’t bother with Jameson’s, it is awful.

Sláinte, lads.