no sex, please, we're Irish
Mar. 13th, 2005 10:35 amThere's no Gaelic word for "sex", apparently. Or maybe we have a lot of them. (via funferal, whose post on the subject is itself worth reading.) Despite being a poor Gaelgóir (as illustrated by the fact that I've probably spelled that incorrectly) even I knew gnéas, although my recollection is that it's sex-as-in-gender rather than sex-as-in-horizontal-mambo. Also, focáil looks suspiciously like a borrowing from English, since the pronunciation would be not particularly different from "fuck all", and even among us non-speakers there's a tendency to create Irish words by taking an English verb and applying the suffix "áil" to it - it's akin to verbing a noun by adding "ing".