A chara, - Shane Hegarty (July 12th) uses the term "colourful language" to describe Irish people's obsession with inserting extraneous obscenities into their speech.
Yet there is nothing at all "colourful" about the dreary and mindless repetition of crudities that one hears throughout the country. If they add any colour to our speech, it is merely the hue described by James Joyce as "snot-green".
Hegarty quotes Diarmaid Ó Muirithe as claiming that Irish people swear no more than any others. This is surely wrong. In two decades spent in the United States, from Manhattan to California to the Deep South, I never came across anything to match the pathological slovenliness of speech of the Irish.
Come to think of it, I never came across anything to match the litter of Ireland either. Perhaps the two forms of dirt are related. - Is mise,
DAVID BARNWELL, Serpentine Avenue, Dublin 4.