Conundrum. You're working on a burning trash pile of a '90s TV show and need some spooky, mysterious language to lorem ipsum into a book of supposedly occult nature. Which tongue has a suitable enough clusterfuck of vowels to make the prop look like it's about to summon Yog-Sothoth?

The makers of Buffy The Vampire Slayer reached for Irish Gaelic, it appears, and seemingly copy-pasted garbled strings of local news to fill the page beneath an equally bullshit "sigil".

An eagle-eyed gael inadvertently outed himself as a fan of the series, which stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, when he posted on Twitter:

The Irish in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode is about a new bus lane opening in Dublin. pic.twitter.com/i87idpRG6H — Damien Ryan (@djryan) February 15, 2019

Forum denizens on Reddit then began tossing the image about, where it was the subject of much mirth among the r/ireland community.

Deep analysis (slowly typing it into Google Translate) by The Register's backroom gremlins indeed confirmed the text to open with something about about a bus lane for "Baile Átha Cliath", or Dublin in the common parlance, but it quickly descended into what looked like a very bad translation of the episode's script itself.

Superfans were quickly able to identify the screenshot as coming from the fourth episode of season four, "Fear Itself", which IMDB summarised thusly: "On Halloween, Buffy and her friends find themselves trapped inside a haunted frat house complete with real bats, zombies, and a terrifying demon."

Predictably with bad prosthetics, smoke machines and hokey joke line delivery.

References to "Gachnar" in the book likely refer to the demon of the week, but we aren't going to dust off the DVD player to check. Let's just use the moment to be grateful this dross no longer haunts our TV screens (unless you watch reruns on Syfy). ®