Country Living with Francis Farragher

THOSE of us who earn our daily bread from putting words together in the form of stories or columns always have a certain fascination with new  phrases. My old desktop word ally, the online Collins Dictionary confirms its annual ‘Word of the Year’ for the most used new phrase that enters the  official vocabulary through everyday usage.

Perhaps the ‘big one’ over the past decade or so has been the phrase ‘fake news’ which in 2017 took the Collins Dictionary accolade for the Word[s] of the Year, and of course we all know who the great champion of that is.

One Donald Trump – who certainly was involved in no fake news incident at the weekend when he came within inches of losing his life – has laid claim to the phrase, but according to Collins it had its roots in the early 2000s on US television news shows, using the words to describe the dissemination of false information disguised as genuine news reports.

The ultimate irony in all of this, is that Trump’s fake news vitriol against the mainstream media continues, is the testimony from the former publisher of the National Enquirer newspaper that they committed themselves to being the ‘eyes and ears’ of Trump as he sought to secure the world’s top political job for a second time.

As well as that, they were alleged to have collaborated in a ‘catch and kill’ policy in support of Trump where any negative stories about ‘the president to be’, would be ‘bought up’ and never see the light of day.

Anyway, enough about US politics, spart from one last amateur observation on the rather shocking dilemma that the electorate of that country faces: a case of one being bad and the other being worse. We probably should appreciate a bit more the ‘Michael Ds, Simons, Micheáls and Mary Lous’ of our Irish political landscape. Fake news, hoaxes and April Fool’s ruses have long been a part of life across the globe long before we heard of Trump or the National Enquirer, and as a child, I can recall kitchen conversations about how a large swathe of the US population [oops, back to America again] believed that Martians had landed on earth as part of an all-conquering mission to take us over.

Pictured: The ‘exclusive’ front-page Sentinel ‘story’ of April 1, 1980 . . .  and the only picture ever taken of the elusive ‘Argentinian soccer star’ Pedro Prila-Loof.