Or, as Chapman says, using objectionable language to stress his point, 'those wogs in the north-west'. A strength of Chapman's argument is that it brings in material and perceptions too often left out. Like the Byzantine Empire's continuing use of the term 'keltoi', 'Celt', to mean peoples now usually categorised as 'German' or 'Italo-German'. Anna Comnena refers to the Crusaders as 'Celts'. Linked with this oppositional structure is the tendency for fashions, of the arts and the intellect, anything and everything, to move from the core to the periphery.
Romanticism then intervenes.
The core chooses to glamorise the periphery. Chapman notes in passing that this puts an extraordinary moral pressure on those people at the periphery who still speak a threatened language. Irish specialists may feel that Chapman's book overlaps somewhat with Writing Ireland. His detailed examples come from his field work in Brittany and in the Scottish Highlands. Part of Chapman's scepticism is understandable, and comes out of the patterns of intellectual discourse within universities in recent decades.