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How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Counterpunch) (English and Irish Edition)

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from the "Irish News", Belfast, July 18, 2007,

"It is a conundrum that has long confused scholars - why the Irish language seems to have had little influence on English as spoken in America. Millions of Irish emigrated to America but English as Americans now speak it appears devoid of Irish references - despite the reputation of the Irish for verbal creativity. Now a new book credits the Irish language for influencing spoken English - and slang most of all.

In How the Irish Invented Slang: the Secret Language of the Crossroads, Irish American academic Daniel Cassidy demonstrates that the influence of Irish emigrants on American existence went beyond pubs and politics.

"The words and phrases of Ireland are as woven into the clamour (glam mor, great howl, shout and roar) and racket (raic ard, loud melee) of American life as the hot jazz (teas, pron j'as, cd'as, heat, passion, excitement) of New Orleans."

Mr Cassidy hopes to waft the winds of change in studies of English - but reminds readers that academics have long harboured a snobbish attitude to Irish. HL Mencken, author of The American Language, said the Irish had contributed very few words to Americans. "Perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list," Mencken wrote.

Mr Cassidy points out that West used the word "babe", meaning a physically attractive woman, in 1926 - and that the Irish word 'bab' meant a baby, woman or a term of affection. And baloney, meaning nonsense - a word synonymous with America if ever there was one - is derived from the Irish beal onna, meaning foolish talk.

So the idea that the Irish have contributed zilch (word meaning nothing or zero, origin unknown) to American English could be bealonna (baloney after all." - Margaret Canning

I'm sure this book is full of scholarly errors.

However, clearly there are many, many American words related to gambling, physical labor, violence, conversation, affection, poverty etc. that the professional scholars cannot - or have not bothered - to trace. Reality dictates these words had to have come from SOMEWHERE.

Where did they come from then? There isn't an infinite number of potential sources.

If these words did not come from native languages, Spanish, French, German or Dutch, maybe, just maybe they came from one of the biggest waves of immigrants ever to hit American shores.

Is that such a leap of logic?

How is it these scholars can trace some words back thousands of years, but words that sprung up in the 19th and early 20th century in America remain "of obscure origin?"

The problem is, of course, that there wasn't a whole lot of vernacular writing going on in the US when most of these words came to be and were Anglicized. People who wrote were rare and they were trained in the King's English (or French, Spanish or Dutch.)

Remember Mark Twain guys?

His writing was SHOCKING because he attempted to document the way real people spoke. No one else of prominence even attempted this and he came along very late in the game. The reality is there are a few centuries of American English we know little about - because it was never written down. Does that mean we stop thinking about word origins from this period?

Language begins with speech and then makes its way to print often long after the fact. It amazes me that people presenting themselves as professional linguists don't seem to know or appreciate this.

The scholars bitch and moan that since there is no clear written record of given Irish terms making an orderly, traceable transition to given American English terms, then Cassidy's guesses as to the origin of various American slang words are completely invalid.

That's absurd.

Where I live in the Hudson Valley, there are many odd place names that are Dutch adaptations of original Native American place names. The Dutch grabbed words from their own vocabulary that sounded like the Native words and applied them to these places and they stuck - even if they made no sense in Dutch and they almost never do.

Come to think of it the French and English did the same thing. What's an "Iroquois" for example. You won't find the word in pre-Columbian France. It's the grabbing of one word (native) with another tongue (French.) It happens all the time.

(Thanks to the Jesuits who were linguists and did write things down we can trace what happened in this particular case. Otherwise, I can see the same scholars who trash Cassidy running around trashing anyone who suggests "Iroquois" might have native origins.)

Clearly there are many common American-English terms of 19th century origin that make no sense whatsoever in English. We use them daily, we know what they mean, but if you analyze them they're odd at best.

"Longshoreman" for example.

What the heck is a "longshore"? There is no such word in English, but there is an Irish word that sounds a lot like it and it means "maritime worker." Who were the maritime workers in America? In the 19th century, overwhelmingly the Irish.

Circumstantial evidence? It sure is and it's damn good circumstantial evidence. Enough to hang a pompous scholar on.

Reality check for the ivory tower types:

How many Irish-speaking famine victims who arrived in the US in literal rags and worked in far-worse-than-slavery conditions on the docks and elsewhere do you think kept journals, wrote letters to the editor, or even wrote letters back home?

These were profoundly impoverished people most of whom didn't even have a home to write back to as they came from villages that were destroyed by famine.

They were also severely penalized for speaking Irish (it was legally banned in Ireland by the British). Not conditions conducive for generating literary traces that professional linguists can track from the comfort of their stuffed chairs.

I think the professional linguists have a lot of explaining to do as to how they missed this obvious and obviously fertile contributing source of the American language.

I guess it's easier to dump on a gifted and insightful amateur than it is to do worthwhile work.

I have to say that the reception this book has been given shocks me. Why do respectable academics put their reputations on the line to defend something which is so sloppy and poorly-researched? Other people react as if ethnic pride entitles you to ignore the truth. The level of some of the comments I have read on different websites reminds me of the Columbus Day episode of the Sopranos. To those who will take umbrage at what I'm saying and regard me as a WASP/revisionist/communist/fascist/self-hating Gael/eejit, I just have one suggestion. Why don't you look up buanchumadh on Google. Then look up some of the real Irish expressions used by Irish speakers to mean nonsense - seafóid, raiméis, amaidí. You will notice that there are many entries for buanchumadh but all of them - ALL OF THEM - are related to Daniel Cassidy. This is not the case with seafóid, raiméis and amaidí - they get lots of hits from lots of sources. This proves that those words are used by Irish speakers, while buanchumadh was invented by Cassidy. The same for lots of other Cassidyisms, like bocaí rua and teas ioma. Other claims are invalidated because they already have explanations which are much more convincing, like longshoreman. (Plus the fact that loingseoir is pronounced lingshore.) By the time you have removed all the rubbish from this book, there is virtually nothing left.
The worst thing is that the lexicographers have sometimes been lax in looking for Irish sources for words, as Cassidy claims. For example, the OED gives conk (a big nose) as possibly deriving from conch, ignoring the Irish word cainc which means a big nose. But the flood of totally fake derivations in this book doesn't help to get the genuine examples recognised. Quite the reverse.

Here you will find an introduction to the Irish language through a discussion of American slang and Irish-American history with a very inventive and inclusive spirit. Certain words and phrases common in every day speech will make a lot more sense once you have considered Cassidy's insights, and the Irish language will seem less distant and unapproachable. I recommend this book to any word maven and to anyone interested in the Irish-American experience and roots.

I am not myself Irish, but I've long had a fascination with Irish-American culture and its overwhelming influence on American culture as a whole. I think that what we have come to think of as modern, urban American culture, the sort of hip, slangy, fast-talking, culture we see in movies, hear in music, read in books, etc., originates entirely from the culture that evolved amongst Irish immigrants (it started with the Irish and was expanded and built upon by all who followed). The idea that they could have made little or no contribution to the American language is patently absurd when one admits how deeply and thoroughly they influenced everything else.

I've actually read Mencken's books, and while they've come to be considered classics, leave us not forget that Mencken, like Cassidy, was no trained linguistic scholar. He was a newspaper columnist with an amateur's interest in the subject. To throw Mencken at us as a way of disputing Cassidy's credentials is ridiculous because one's credentials are as valid as the other's. Also, I don't need so-called professional scholars to approve what I will or will not believe. It's obvious, for instance, that any book with the title "Oxford English Dictionary" is necessarily going to be prejudiced against admitting any kind of Irish influence, if it can be avoided, especially when one considers the time period in which the OED was originally formulated.

No, I don't need the scholars to tell me what is right, because they engage in as much guess work as we lay people do, only they cloak it in arcane language and references. I read a book like this and will, as Abraham Lincoln once said of the Bible, "swallow what I can and leave the rest for somebody else to chew on." I don't swallow everything in this book, nor do I find every section of it 100% plausible. Yet there is enough here that I do swallow. If only 50% of it is correct, and I suspect that that is so, it throws all the theories about the lack of Irish influence on the language into a cocked hat. At the very least, it opens, or should open, new ideas and new avenues of exploration for the professional scholars, and should cause the more open minded of them to reconsider their assumptions--If only they'll do some swallowing of their own--of their professional pride--and admit that sometimes an amateur can develop insights into a subject that the experts and engineers miss (for example, in the development of Television: the work of amateurs John Logie Baird & Philo Farnsworth).

For just the average, non-professional reader who is interested in the American language, whether they are Irish or not, it presents an interesting, informative, educational and entertaining read, and I'd just say that while I believe the author was sincere in advancing an earnest theory--in other words was not just engaging in ethnic bragging--the reader should be willing to make up his or her own mind as he or she reads it, should be willing to accept certain things and reject others. There are a lot of new ideas here, some of which are probably right and others of which are probably wrong. You don't either have to accept or reject everything in the book to get something out of it. Some readers & reviewers seem to think it must be either 100% right or 100% wrong, which in such a book as this is obviously not the case.

I purchased this book after hearing the author on a radio program impressed by Cassidy's passion and entertaining story telling style. I gave the book to my mother who is 100% Boston Irish who enjoyed it immensely. Cassidy's claims about how Irish has seeped into American English are all in all fairly plausible and many of us can attest to observing the exact same incorporations of other foreign terms into our lexicon as it is literally happening every day. It is observable that the dominant culture of a society will take words from new cultures and wrangle them into a new format for use in its own speech. A number of the reviewers here have given good examples.

Cassidy makes no claim to be a linguist or that this is a scholarly work, but critics here of Cassidy's book appear to want to substitute complex and implausible etymologies because this is a process they understand and use rather than the simple, uncomplicated easily observable ways Cassidy has put forward.

Language is very plastic, and in American English particularly which is full of slang, abbreviations, acronyms, and simile, new words are incorporated daily at a fantastic rate and by many different avenues. There is a sort of "linguistic Imperialism" to American English due to us being a land of immigrants which makes this introduction and manipulation of new terms coming from foreign sources commonplace.

Mr. D. Norder from Knoxville certainly doesn't like this book. He claims to have done a lot of work on the phrase, "Say Uncle" for some unspecified linguist yet fails to cite his 'American' phrases by date or use or any logical connection. Mr. Norder accuses Cassidy of being no scholar and wraps his vitriol in a claim that Cassidy is all BUNKUM, another word Cassidy finds Irish origins for. But Mr. Norder proceeds to give that word the folk etymology started by none other than H. L. Mencken, the Bard of Baltimore.
Well, first thing's first: Cry Uncle was identified as a 'loan word'phrase from the Old Irish in no less a scholarly publication than American Speech >Vol. 51, No. 3/4 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 281-282.
Secondly, Mr. Mencken, his rapacious wit notwithstanding, was a brilliant rhetorician as well as a vehement racist, anti-semite and anti-Catholic. I'm sure Mencken would, like Mr. Norder, prefer to believe that the Irish culture couldn't come up with a language of such beauty and nuance that its near destruction by the English overlords could never be brought about.
In other words, get this book; it's fun and makes one wonder all the more about the brilliance of our spoken language.

While I don't dispute the other reviewers' claims that this is an entertaining read, unfortunately the information in it is simply amateurish and almost entirely incorrect. The problem is that the author is not using academic standards of comparative linguistics and has merely shopped around hoping to find Irish words that sound similar (or are spelled similarly) to English slang that he can just sloppily declare as the origin, without any sort of actual historical proof. In fact, most of the words he has chosen to feature already have been traced linguistically to well-proven origins that simply cannot be disputed... and in fact the author does not even try, he just ignores them.

For example, I've put a lot of work into solidifying the origin of the phrase "Say uncle" for a professional linguist and author of several books. I can say that, without a doubt, Daniel Cassidy's claims here that it came from an Irish word are simply incorrect. The phrase first turns up in multiple American references that have no Irish background whatsoever and in which the "uncle" being referred to was an actual man and not some garbled version of the Irish word "anacal". Cassidy actually borrowed this theory from another source (which also was very sloppy in making the claim), but it has since been shown to be incorrect.

If you want to read a bunch of bunkum (which has been shown without a doubt to have come from a U.S. congressman having repeatedly mentioned Buncombe County in a long and pointless speech and not some Gaelic word), then this is the book for you. If you want accurate information, pick a book (or website) written by someone who takes pride in trying to find the truth instead of just forcing square pegs into round holes.

The death of a friend resulted in the author receiving from the estate of that friend a Irish dictionary. As Cassidy studies the dictionary he realizes many of the words, if spelled phonetically, resemble English words. This book is thus a large etymological argument on word origins. It is also a examination of prejudice and how it can blind us to the truth before us. Cassidy argues convincingly that the Irish contribution to English is much, much larger than thought and that the underestimation on the Irish contribution is based on racial/ethnic animus. To be fair, not everyone agrees; a notable critic seems to be Grant Barrett (see his full critique at [...]. Try to ignore the ad hominem that seems to dominate), he said,

"The main thing that bothers me about most of his theories, besides his overall unwillingness to express doubt and caveats about them and his apparent inability to do the work required to prove or disprove his own theories, is that in cultural overlaps and linguistic contact situations in which words are borrowed, there tends to be written proof of it.

This happened repeatedly with contact contacts by the English, French, and Spanish settlers with Native Americans in the New World, and it continues to happen where Spanish and English rub up against each other today. We can see in the written record where the languages have loaned words to each other and how those loanwords changed. Needless to say, many disagree, among them Garret Barret. In his own words,

In those cases, we find borrowed words set off by quotes, dashes, or italics, or explained as "as my gram used to say," or "as we used to say," or even given plainly by a regular person as a word from another language, and so forth. In order to prove Cassidy's claims, primary source material that might contain these sorts of statements needs to be found and examined: letters, books, diaries, newspapers, what have you. Certainly, across the whole of his book there should be lots and lots of this sort of "language contact" evidence, but there's little that I can see.

If the words he's writing about really did come from Irish Gaelic, the only way to prove it is to find those Irish words repeatedly showing up in some form in print in English-language contexts."

While Cassidy may overreach on some of his arguments much of the criticism appears to me to be unjustified, Cassidy argues after all that Irish words entered the American lexicon through the gambling underworld. Such peoples actions would not meet the criteria outlined above by Mr Barrett, they would hardly publish a lexicon of secret words, and in some cases, such as the cowboy and railroad dittys, you would be talking about near illiterates spelling phonetically; in fact, this may explain why all those cunning linguists out there missed the Irish donation to English. Following the constraint set outlined by Mr Barrett they would have to miss it.

I'm going to start reading some of Pierce Egan's works as one would expect to see Irish loan words in his work as he was an Irishman and a swell. His T&J books Life in London: Or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in Their Rambles and Sprees Through the Metropolis as well as the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue should be a good place to start. In closing, one small, little unremarked upon citation (p 107) regarding Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie demolishes any and all pedantic criticism(s) regarding the origin of any given word (as if the argument for the origin of the one word is wrong ergo all of Cassidy's arguments regarding word origin are therefore wrong) in Cassidy's classic work.

Cassidy cites Yale University music professor Willie Ruff, Ruff says Dizzy told him, ".....blacks near his home in Alabama and the Carolinas had once spoken exclusively in Scots Gaelic." Am I the only one floored by Gaeltechts in the American South peopled by African Americans?! This is a tremendous story, important history completely overlooked by the weavers of Americas Authorized History. Cassidy is right.

This book is a lot of fun, especially since I've been studying Irish for the last year and can validate many of the connections. Every few pages there's a head-slappingly obvious derivation of an English word from Irish, yet most English dictionaries STILL mark the word as "etymology unknown". Why would you cry "uncle" when you lose a wrestling match? Because it's really the Irish word "anacal" which means "protection" or "quarter".

I'm pretty confident in his Irish source for the words "jazz", "snazzy", "uncle", "lunch", "dig", and many others, but maybe a third of his etymologies seem far-fetched. Some professional linguist should start from this book, validate his work as far as possible, and lobby the English dictionary makers to finally give Irish the credit it deserves.