Cooking.com presented “Top 10 Corned Beef Recipes for St. Patty's Day” last week, and at least one Concord restaurant also implied that the day of green beer was intended to honor St. Patricia. They should have been advertising St. Paddy's Day, from Padraig, a form of the name familiar to sports fans in recent years due to the ascent of one Padraig Harrington to the top ranks of golfers.
Joyceans recall that Leopold Bloom attends Paddy Dignam's funeral. The same diminutive pops up in “paddy wagon.” I'm not sure if this is a reference to Irish cops hauling people away or to the denigrating stereotype of inebriated sons of Erin being tossed into the back of the vehicle. Be that as it may, with Presidents' Day getting mangled by a misplaced apostrophe in February, let's not start perpetuating an error in March's secular holiday.
WMUR-TV was misled by Irish festivities last week when it noted that Bill Clinton received the William O'Douglas Award. The surname of the former Supreme Court Justice is simply Douglas. The O is his middle initial, and can be lengthened to Orville.
Also, to fulfill my primary task of picking on the Insider itself, I note the editor's mention of “plenty of regular features that we think makes our publication special.” I'm sorry to say that agreement requires that the verb here be “make.” In fact, when I typed “makes,” my computer underlined the word in green, flagging it as an error. Don't computers at the Insider have such a function?
