Ag Surfail

1 March 2003

What do housekeeping and "footing turf" have in common? Well, it turns out your computer can do both.

Actually, it does neither. Before a computer opens a new program, it does what the geeks call "housekeeping", which means it tidies up its memory, checking that it has enough free space to run the program without crashing.

But what's the Irish for computer housekeeping? According to An Coiste Tearmaíochta, the Irish equivalent is "fódóireacht", or footing. This gem comes courtesy of a new dictionary of computer terms released recently by the translations agency that keeps track of new words in Irish.

The new dictionaries have created all the usual minor rows over the choices the Coiste made, with huffing that words like "printéir"(printer), "logáil ann" (log on), "facs" (fax) and "ciú" (queue) were too English, and didn't bode well for the future of the language.

Still, for every example like that, there are words like fódóireacht and ríomhphost (email). One I particularly like is the word for "cookies", the small file some websites put on your computer to keep track of which pages of their site you look at. The Irish word is "fianán", a new word based on "fianaise" the Irish word for evidence.

Best of luck to the new dictionary anyway. People will always speak as they want, with no regard to whether purists approve of the words they use, but at least the Coiste's work means we'll all know what we're talking about. Or as much as possible anyway. Some of us will just be puzzled about computers in two languages now, instead of just one.