For as long as I can remember, I've been familiar with the word "crack". It's a monosyllable packed with power. It has connotations of fun, wit, gossip, cheekiness. "He's great crack" is a high compliment. I was devastated when, during my brief foray into the civil service, I learned that Betty in Newforge Lane had said of me "That young fella's no crack at all." It may have wider currency, but it always seemed to me to be peculiarly Northern Irish, like Veda bread, big yellow cranes and painfully inept continuity announcers.
Then, at some point in the 1990s, "crack" was appropriated by the British hospitality industry (is there a more depressing phrase than "hospitality industry?" Yes, there is, and I'll get to it in a minute). It was hideously made over as "craic" and it started to appear in green paint and a fake-antique font on the gable walls of dreadful English pubs with bodhrans hanging on the walls. Craic agus ceol, they proclaimed (that was it: bleakest phrase in any language).
And now people think that "craic" is a loan-word from Irish. It's as authentically Irish as Darby O'Gill, or that Mission: Impossible episode where they rigged up a fake banshee to stop the Protestants and Catholics fighting.
I fucking hate "craic'.
