In "The Hair of the Dogma", Paladin, isbn 0 586 08947 0
lch 120.

(ag caint ar a ról larnach fhéin i nGluaiseacht na teangain (mar dhéa))

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What then have I accomplished? How is it now with the old land, how fare her people? Well, vastly well. So well, in fact, that nameless and unnameable churls can write epistles and address them to our person with the greeting 'A Chara... a greeting not merely jacobin in its coarseness, but one for which, in the traditions of our face and tongue - of manners in this context it were obscure to speak - there exists no clear precedent - a greeting which, flouting a divinely instituted hierarchy of human values and setting at naught the dignity of man himself, adumbrates a new 'civilisation' which is to mean merely a slough of revolting loutish amity, a country composed solely of ...of...of...cáirde!

Sad, you will say, a deplorable return for all my pains I agree. The funny thing is that I could easily have stamped out the whole rank growth if I had been more mindful of my business. Seeing this cara word sprouting all over the place thirty or forty years ago, I took no action. Assumed all the time it was the Greel for 'head' and that the peasants were harmlessly immersing themselves in the 'dear dark head' or some similar canon. Now I know better, but I have no regrets.