The Dog Injures Me Every Night

Fri, Apr 6, 2018

There are many things to like about Duolingo, but one of the chiefest among those is the delightful array of surprising sentences that pop up from time to time.

Gortaíonn an madra mé gach oíche. The dog injures me every night.

Those few words, like a poem, conjure an unexpectedly rich sensory tapestry. And although “usefulness” is a poor measure of an expression’s worth, it only adds to the pleasure to put myself into the scene and to envision the context in which I might, as a traveller in Ireland, have occasion to fire off this devastating linguistic salvo.