I played in my first competition on Sunday and although I didn’t do as well as I have been doing in informal games it wasn’t a total disaster.

Over the post game refreshments the conversation turned to Erse.

The initial capital will have alerted you to the fact that we are not talking bottoms here but language. It seems that in French crossword puzzles erse generally means Scottish Gaelic. (There is also a French word erse whose meaning need not detain us here.)

I maintained that this was nonsense and that Erse is Irish Gaelic. Later investigation via the OED, Chambers, Collins, Marian-Webster, Britannia and Columbia revealed that the origins of the word go back to Old English “Irisc” and/or Old Norse “Irskr” meaning Irish.

Point proved you might think but not quite. Various quotations show that Erse was applied to Scottish Gaelic in the past, often on the basis of its supposed derivation from the Irish(or its true one for all I know). But the authorities are pretty unanimous that currently its use is restricted to Irish Gaelic.

So I’m counting that a draw and suggesting to my French buddies that their crossword compilers need a boot up the e**e to bring them up to date.