Wordie: Slang words of Irish origin according to Daniel Cassidy, author of 'How the Irish Invented Slang': Comments

Comment by sionnach, about 1 year ago

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:32:52 +0000

Grant: Thank you from the bottom of my heart. It bothers me inordinately when people try to pass off intellectual laziness as scholarship, which is clearly what the meister* of dreck, Cassidy would like to do. In other news, The New York Times apparently continues its slide into intellectual mediocrity. The article did confirm my suspicion that Cassidy's familiarity with actual spoken Irish is likely to be tenuous at best.

*meister: A word mistakenly believed to be of German origin, but actually derived from the Gaelic 'maistir'. With 6 of 7 letters in common, there can be no argument. case closed. (See how easy it is, when you don't actually have to make an intelligent argument?)

The following sentence from Poser's article sums up the statistical objection succinctly:

The mathematics of probability shows that superficial lexical comparison fails to provide evidence that similarities are not due to chance.

Comment by GrantBarrett, about 1 year ago

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:30:24 +0000

As a professional lexicographer, I made my thoughts known yesterday on the subject of how bad this book is.

Comment by sionnach, about 1 year ago

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:24:08 +0000

flannagan: We're probably going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Ultimately my scepticism can be traced back to my professional training (I'm a statistician). From a statistical viewpoint, given the exercise you describe (trawling through words of unknown or undecided etymology and looking for apparent similarities to xxx-ish words, where xxx could be any language), it's a dead certainty you will come up with a list of apparent "matches", just by chance alone. Then, given the human tendency to see "patterns" where none actually exist, the so-called "matches" are given undue credence. It's the same kind of fallacious reasoning that causes people to find and believe in hidden codes in the bible.

But, in the larger scheme of things, it seems like a relatively harmless exercise, I suppose. But you'll never get me to believe that jazz is of Irish etymology. :)

As I said, we should agree to disagree.

Comment by flannagan, about 1 year ago

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:58:09 +0000

I fully understand the prejudice against these sort of books—the title of this one is kind of embarrassing. But there is some genuinely interesting stuff inside. When you look at all the old American slang words listed as "origin unknown" in the great English dictionaries, then take into account the millions of Irish-speaking immigrants who poured into American, British and Australian ports in the 19th and 20th centuries, then look at the striking phonetic and semantic similarities of the slang words with common Gaelic words and phrases in use at the time, then research the first published use of the slang words in question—a case starts to be built up that isn't easily brushed aside. And in most of the examples given in the book, the case for the Gaelic origin is a lot stronger than the alternative.

One example: the phrase "mind your own bee's wax," which first became popular in American slang in the 1920s. No one knows where it came from, and many wacky theories have been proposed. Meanwhile béasmhaireacht (pron. beeswəract) = morality, manners, habits.

The book's worth picking up and flipping through if you see it in the bookstore, if for nothing else than to look up the supposed Gaelic origins of the word "gimmick."

Comment by John, about 1 year ago

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:41:49 +0000

My Dad fell into just the trap you describe with How the Irish Saved Civilization (to be fair, he was stuck at an airport with nothing to read, fair excuse). I made fun of him, and the book, when I saw he had it, but I have to admit, when I actually read it, it was better than I expected. It's a pop treatment and monofocused, but it's not too poorly written, as far as the genre goes, and there were a few interesting nuggets in there.

Comment by sionnach, about 1 year ago

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:59:11 +0000

To be honest, the explanations you cite seem completely unconvincing - nothing more than what could be obtained by seeking out random apparent coincidences in pronunciation. And even some of those coincidences are stretching it - for instance teas to jazz, where it's really only the vowel sound is preserved - I don't see a 'j' or a 'z' being related naturally to Irish at all. And neither 'áilteoir scaoilte' nor 'roiseadh mórtas' would be a common expression in modern Irish. I think the author thought of a gimmick and then went in search of random coincidences to support that gimmick.

To be fair, I should state a prejudice against books with titles of this kind, ('How the Irish Saved Civilization' would be the canonical example), which seem motivated more by a desire to tap into a presumed ready-made sympathetic audience than any kind of genuine scholarship. If the only tool in your kit is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and if you look at words with a preconceived preference for a specific etymological flavor, this precludes an unbiased examination.

Of course, it can be argued that the reader can decide. But that would require buying the book. At the risk of sounding cynical, I'd suggest that this is the very trap the author is setting by his choice of a gimmicky, provocative title.

Comment by flannagan, about 1 year ago

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:04:15 +0000

sionnach: the Gaelic equivalents of the words you cited: bas (boss; best, very good), áilteoir scaoilte (a run amok clown; an unconstrained wild prankster; a loose-limbed trickster), teas (pron. j'ass; heat, passion, excitement), roiseadh mórtas (a blast of high spirits and exultation; a burst of boastfulness and bragging).

But you really gotta pick up the book for the full explanation.

Comment by sionnach, about 1 year ago

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:06:47 +0000

Compare the etymologies of these words as given in the OED with the Gaelic backgrounders in this book, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Counterpunch, 2007). Await revelation.

I don't have the book in question, but it seems hard to give credence to any particular Irish involvement in the etymology of boss, helter-skelter, jazz, or razzmatazz.