Some of you may have been treated to ‘s rant about the gratuitous invention of the Ulster Scots language. If anyone was left in any doubt about the value of this cultural experiment, you can now make up your mind, thanks to photographs I took at a certain government building earlier today.

The incomprehensible:

The just plain silly:

For those of you unfamiliar with the ways of our wee island, the bottom language in each case is Irish; and while I have my problems with the unnecessary promotion of that language, it is at least a real language which real people speak (using, so I’m told, genuinely naughty words) and whose speakers would be able to recognise the words written here with no difficulty. I flatly refuse to believe that anyone has ever used the words “darg-bann” or “innin” in the senses they are used here, outside the circles of the fantasists who have invented the linguistic excrescence that is Ulster Scots.