The true facts are rarely as colorful as the fictions, and never get passed along as far, so I have no doubt that the colorful fictions will in most cases win out in the long run.

We are certainly permanently stuck with the nonsense about the Irish union pipes, where Grattan-Flood thought, quite erroneously, that 'union' was a corruption of 'Uillinn' (modern spelling), Gaelic for 'elbow', and so renamed them.

I'm still waiting for a bookseller's search to see if I can get the facsimile reprint edition of Duffy's 'Ballad Poetry of Ireland', 1843, to see what he really said about the connection of "Shule Aroon" with the Wild Geese (and hoping that book is where he said it).