Could you stop using the phrase, please?

If you want to use it accurately, then, Celtic only making any sense as a linguistic term, it would refer to the Gaeltachts in Ireland, which are small and widely spread, the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland, which is non-contiguous and well dispersed, and in Wales an area that acts rather like the holes in a sponge cake, except the holes can move around, and presumably grow and shrink as people's commands of Welsh improve and deteriorate. Its overtones are rather too dismissive and pejorative for an idea so ill-thought-out. Can you count all of the space between three speakers of Welsh as part of the Celtic fringe? Does that area diminish to a line if one of them has a stroke?

If you want to follow the usage in newspapers, to mean Scotland, Wales and whatever bits of Ireland the author intends, then you're on a very slidy floor. Bits of Scotland, Orkney for example, have never been provably Celtic. The Highland Line hasn't moved for centuries, and the bulk of the population lives and has lived on the West Germanic side of it. Cornwall kept its own language until after the Reformation. The sense here, of course, isn't linguistic but the sort of racial fiction that's popular with numpties and worse all over the world, especially peculiar, often American, fascists looking for heritage. There is no meaningful genetic distinction between the populations in the different countries of the British Isles.

Scotland, Wales and Ireland are even more Norman inventions than is England.

posted at: 19:28 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry