When I was immersed in the Irish language for a week in Donegal last month, I made plenty of mistakes. But there’s one mistake that I’m actually quite pleased I made.

The emphasis at Oideas Gael is on conversational Irish, so our teacher would often put us into groups of around four people to discuss a particular topic. On one occasion, the topic was food.

We had some starter questions to ask one another to get the conversation going. One of the questions was about how we liked our eggs in the morning. One of my classmates described how her father, when he was in a hurry, would just crack an egg into a glass and gulp it straight down.

If you’re like me, this will immediately make you think of that scene in Rocky. I wanted to say:

Sin sa scannán Rocky!

…which means “that’s in the film Rocky!”.

But what actually came out was:

Sin sa rackán Sconny!

In my excitement, I made a spoonerism.

I’ve come across spoonerisms in English like “my lord is shoving leopard” or “no wucking furries” and I’ve certainly made some myself. But this was the first time it had happened in Irish.

Mistakes are never intentional, but something about this category of mistake felt different. Like, there must be a certain level of comfort with a language for your brain to make an off-the-cuff involuntary mix-up like that.

There are well-known milestones in learning any language. Having your first dream in that language. Making your first pun. This felt kind of like that.