Hollywords of wisdom

The Last Straw: It was a great day for the Irish at last weekend's Academy Awards. Not the Irish people, I mean - the language.

The big winner was Clint Eastwood, for Million Dollar Baby, in which he plays a boxing gym owner who studies "Gaelic" and calls a female protege "mo chuisle". Collecting an Oscar for the latter role, an emotional Hilary Swank declared to Eastwood: "you are my mo chuisle" (a compliment somehow all the more touching for its inclusion of two possessive adjectives). And confirming that the phrase is sweeping the US, the annual Hollyword of the Year list - a survey of words popularised by cinema, released to coincide with the Oscars - showed "mo chuisle" as a new entry this year, at number 4.

By a happy coincidence, Seachtain Na Gaeilge starts this weekend. So Hollywood's contribution to Irish promotion could not be better timed. I'd be very surprised if the people in Foras na Gaeilge are not even now echoing the words of another boxer, the one who used to say: "Thank you very much, Mr Eastwood." The Hollyword survey is compiled by a US group called Global Language Monitor (GLM), which "analyses and catalogues" Tinseltown's influence on English. This year's top word is "pinot", as in the grape variety, and popularised by the film Sideways. Sideways is set in Californian wine country, so pinot's triumph looks a bit like a hometown decision. But "mo chuisle" beat other Californian favourites, including "girlie men" (number 9), now enjoying a second career as a description for Arnold Schwarzenegger's political opponents.

The popularity of phrases can be short-lived, GLM concedes. The group also compiles a television list, and last year's was topped by "you're fired", a term that was given new life by Donald Trump's reality TV series and held off such exciting newcomers as "wardrobe malfunction". But the Sopranos-inspired "fuhgeddaboutit!" had dropped out of the top 10, and the once-fashionable "so" was just so last season, apparently, you wouldn't believe it.

Even temporary fame can be valuable, however. US sales of pinot noir wine are reportedly up 16 per cent since the release of Sideways. This is despite the grape's notoriety among producers. An "often misunderstood and sensitive varietal", it is known to wine-makers as the "heartbreak grape", because it can be so hard to get right.

The comparisons with Irish are obvious. In fact, Clint Eastwood seems to have run into the problems the rest of us faced at school. Asked what "mo chuisle" means, his character mistranslates it as "my darling" when, as GLM points out, it means "my pulse". But let's not be pedantic. The language group's website also includes a feature about George W. Bush, who uses the word "embetter" to mean "improve" and once warned that an issue wouldn't "resignate" with the public. Under the headline "Don't Misunderestimate Dubya", GLM admits that, by being lampooned, his mistakes have a habit of entering the language. After the Oscars triumph, the obvious next step for Irish promoters is to lobby President Bush for a cúpla focal during the St Patrick's Day ceremonies. He's bound to get them wrong. But his attempted use of Irish will resignate with a wide audience, to the overall embetterment of the language.

We can be a bit a parochial in this country sometimes. But spare a thought for Uruguay, where outrage over the Oscars apparently overshadowed the inauguration of the country's first socialist president this week. According to the Wall Street Journal, the row began when a local singer, Jorge Drexler, won the best song award for the theme from the Che Guevara film The Motorcycle Diaries. It was Uruguay's first Oscar, and national pride knew no bounds until the ceremony producers announced that Drexler was too obscure to perform at the actual show. Spanish film hunk Antonio Banderas sang the song instead, over howls of protest from Montevideo. But when he accepted the award, Drexler performed a couple of verses a capella, an act of defiance that was compared back home with Uruguay's defeat of Brazil in the 1950 World Cup. All the main TV news programmes led with the story on Monday, while on Tuesday, the country's largest-selling newspaper gave Drexler a "six-page special section".

A nation of 3.3 million people, squeezed between Argentina and Brazil, Uruguay has "self-image issues", the WSJ reported. The songwriter's brother Daniel admitted to the paper that Uruguayans long for recognition. In a rather poignant note, he added: "We got excited when they mentioned the word Uruguay on The Simpsons, even though they pronounced it 'you are gay' and made a joke about it."