What's the craic?

I've been here a bit over a month now, and I had been doing pretty well at fighting off the third-week illness¹ that afflicted everyone else in my class. This weekend, however, it finally hit me. It started out with a really bad sore throat, transitioned into a very solid cough, and now has moved up into my sinuses. I'm going to do my best to write a coherent entry though I can't breathe out of my nose and my head feels like it's being held upside-down underwater.


I have gone to a couple of pubs in the the last two weeks, so I thought about writing on pub culture. Then it occurred to me that you can't talk about pub culture without talking about the craic.

Craic, pronounced like "crack," is an Irish word. It is most often translated as "fun," but that isn't quite accurate. A closer translation might be "entertainment," but that also isn't exactly it. It's one of those wonderful words that doesn't have a strict analogue in English. As a concept, it's something like "a good time."

It's usually used as a noun and occasionally a descriptive. Of a person, you can say "he's good craic." Of a place or activity, you can say "it's good craic," or "the craic is good." You and your friends can be messing around, not taking things seriously, "for a bit of craic." You can even ask someone "what's the craic?" if you want to know what fun things are happening. I was invited to a pub on Friday, the Roísín Dubh², and when I got there I was informed by an Irish guy that, even though it's usually busy, the craic is good.

Of course, thanks to my Linguistics background, I can't help but hear something idiomatic without trying to figure out its cultural context and distribution. Of course, most of the Irish people I've met have been around my age, but it seems pretty common with both young people and older people. I get the feeling that it's a bit more widely-used here in the West. When I was in Dublin on my study abroad, I didn't meet too many Irish people, but I did talk to some, and I don't remember hearing it once. Now, I've only been here a month, and I've heard it all over the place. One young man who has lived here in Galway all his life uses it frequently, but I know a girl from Dublin and I don't think I've heard her say it once.

Of course, these are all generalizations based on my rather limited observations. No matter who uses it and where, though, I think it's a pretty darn cool word.




1: This is something that college orientation programs really should talk about-- the fact that, in the third week after school starts up, you probably will get sick. Everyone coming back from their holidays and being closely confined is a great opportunity for disease, and colds never fail to go around.

2: "Roísín Dubh," or "Little Black Rose," is a nickname for Ireland.