Today, we had a lecture on media regulation and the state of Irish media with Professor Roderick Flynn from Dublin City University. It was a very engaging and informative lecture. As a non-COMM student, a lot of the visits and lectures throughout the trip weren’t exactly my speed, but I found myself taking certain things away from them. Some things I took away were to struggle to maintain the Gaelic language and our discussion on abortion/reproductive rights. On the first topic, Professor Flynn discussed how even though learning the Irish language is a requirement in schools, it is not commonly spoken and is losing significance. We also touched on abortion was only legalized a few years ago in Ireland. I often feel like we think our own country in terms of its politics and look to other countries as examples of what we should be doing, but even then they aren’t perfect either.
After the lecture, we went to the National Print Museum which was fairly interesting as well. They had displays of working machinery and showed us how printing used to be and how it has evolved. They also taught us several phrases that were born out of printing:
- “Mind your Ps and Qs”
- Comes from the printing industry due to the letters P and Q looking very similar and can be easily confused during the printing press set-up (which is upside-down and backwards).
- “Coining a Phrase”
- Comes from the process of setting a phrase into place on a printing press, which is called “coining”.
- “Uppercase” and “Lowercase”
- Comes from the literal location that printing press letters were stored. Capital letters were always stored in the top drawers, or upper cases, and lowercase letters were (you guessed it) stored in the lower drawer, or lower case.
