Craic
The context involving 'news' and 'gossip' originated in English[5] and Scots[6] and came to Ireland through Ulster dialects of English, where the sense of 'fun' developed.
Like the origin of words over the centuries, 'crack' was borrowed, probably in the 1960s or 1970s, into the Irish language with a Gaelicized spelling ('craic'); popularized in the catchphrase 'Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn' ('We'll have music, chat and crack'), used by Seán Bán Breathnach for his Irish-language chatshow SBB ina Shuí, broadcast on RTÉ from 1976 to 83. 'Craic' was also used on Irish-language hand-lettered signs displayed outside many pubs, and subsequently the Irish spelling was reborrowed for English-language signs and publications. Until the late 1980s, this spelling was unknown in English: Barney Rush's 1960s song "The Crack Was Ninety In The Isle of Man" doesn't use the Irish-language spelling.
Fintan Vallely condemned the Gaelicised spelling in his Companion to Irish Traditional Music,[7] and elaborated via an open letter to an internet forum[8]: '[T]he spelling craic causes serious nausea among intelligent people. This glib spelling of the word was invented in the 1970s ... it is the context of the use of the (recent, modern) Irish spelling of the word that is the issue - if craic is to be used, it should be used while writing in the Irish language, OR placed in parentheses or in italics when writing in English. I stress that this is a word which was NEVER in the Irish language (but cráic, meaning arsehole, or creac, meaning herd, are). ... I grew up using the word in the 1950s. When I went to Dublin (from Ulster) in 1968 NOBODY I met in Dublin used 'crack' ... 'Crack' only began to be used with the influx of northerners and in the context of music, it travelled with northern influence (at the fleadh cheoil, etc) until southern people began to believe that they had invented it. Ciaran Carson is particular enraged by the craic spelling, so too Desi Wilkinson and many other otherwise tolerant souls.'
Now, 'craic' is interpreted as a specifically and quintessentially Irish form of fun. The adoption of the Gaelic spelling has reinforced the sense that this is an independent word (homophone) rather than a separate sense of the original word (polysemy). One columnist for The Irish Times once said of the word: 'Most Irish people now have no idea it's foreign.' Critics have accused the Irish tourism industry and the promoters of Irish theme pubs of marketing 'commodified craic' as a kind of stereotypical Irishness.
