“Tabhair dom an pis thalún, le do thoil,” was something one of the older ladies in my household was wont to say at breakfast every morning.* It made me wince– she was using “pis thalún” to refer to the peanut butter (though it really only means peanut), insisting that that was what peanut butter was called. Yet our hosts usually called it peanut butter. Pádraig particularly was not thrilled with that sort of thing, like using anann instead of “pineapple.”
If it wasn’t something native to Ireland, generally you use the English/ other language equivalent. Whenever we asked Pádraig how to say things of that nature in Irish, he’d usually counter with “Cad é iógart i mBéarla?” (what is yoghurt in English?) to illustrate that Irish had every right to use loanwords just as English does.
I’m not sure that that lady ever really got the point that Pádraig was making, as she continued to insistent on the correctness of the dictionary over what the actual native usage of the language is. That sort of thing drives me crazy in any language really, as linguistic prescriptivism generally only serves to create a hierarchy of language usage that generally disadvantages speakers of a certain socio-economic status. Language is a living organism whose life is dictated by its speakers, as I referred to in an earlier post; there’s a point where you need to abandon the dictionary and let the community you’re in really dictate what you’re doing.
*Side note: they generally did our housing by age, so we had four people in their 60s/70s, two men in their forties, then myself at 27, and three 22 year olds; it was an interesting combination, and I genuinely mean that.