Ní cothram na Féinne é sin: Cricket,Lexicography and Cultural Purity in Ireland1

This article explores the relationship between the game of cricket and the Irish language in Ireland. In our analysis, dictionaries are invoked as indices of formations of cultural purity and political power, documents of defiance, tools of codification, assertions of confidence, representations of linguistic identity. By examining the treatment of the term “cricket” in Irish language dictionaries from the eighteenth-century to the present day, we find an index of cultural values, responding and adapting to ongoing changing cultural power and capital. This demonstrates how the game, and its translated presence in the lexicography of the native language, functions as a form of cultural hybridity in the nineteenth-century, yet is cleansed in the twentieth as part of the process of Irish cultural purity (as it fights for an established postcolonial nationhood). The article offers a new way of understanding social and linguistic conventions, in the context of the colonial/postcolonial, and how such conventions function in the field of sport. Given the dominance (with the exception of India) of English as the lingua franca of sport's colonial and ludic diffusion, the article's ability to access and interrogate the processes of inclusion/exclusion in the linguistic and sporting Irish setting marks it out as an original and innovative way of understanding how cultural transfers occurred and were later annulled.     

Happiness and Virtue in Positive Psychology

Positive psychologists aspire to study the moral virtues, as well as positive emotions, while retaining scientific objectivity. Within this framework, Martin Seligman, a founder of positive psychology, offers an empirically‐based argument for an ancient and venerable theme: happiness can be increased by exercising the virtues. Seligman's project is promising, but it needs to pay greater attention to several methodological matters: (1) greater care in defining happiness, so as to avoid smuggling in value assumptions of the sort suggested by the title of his book, Authentic Happiness; (2) more attention to the gap between happiness as overall satisfaction and specific gratifications (enjoyments); (3) the danger of sliding to subjectivism by equating self‐assessments of virtue with objectively‐justified values of the sort Aristotle had in mind; (4) awareness of how “positive” emotions and attitudes presuppose value assumptions.     

Issues of Risk Practice and Welfare in Learning Disability Services

This article focuses on risk management in services for people with learning disabilities. It identifies the issue of risk as central to many historical and current care practices. It illustrates this through three examples that raise questions of risk in relationship to people with learning disabilities: on community care, alcohol and sexuality. It concludes that risk has often been negatively associated with danger, but that sensitive risk management has the potential to improve or maintain the quality of care services.