For some time now, some of my on-line friends have advised me to provide a version of CassidySlangScam without the invective aimed at Cassidy and his supporters. In response to that advice, I am working on providing a glossary of the terms in Cassidy’s ludicrous book How The Irish Invented Slang with a short, simple and business-like explanation of why Cassidy’s version is wrong.
Aroon (Irish a rún, ‘oh my secret!) is another common endearment which passed into limited use in English in sentimental Irish plays and ballads.
Cassidy didn’t understand the Irish vocative case. The rule, as given by the Christian Brothers on page 55 of their grammar, is that there is no inflection on a noun in the vocative singular where the expression is used metaphorically or affectionately. That means that it should be ‘a rún’ or ‘a stór’, not ‘a rúin’ or ‘a stóir’.
(See an Irish language explanation of this rule here: http://www.scriobh.ie/ScriobhIe/Media/Graimear%20Gaeilge%20na%20mBraithre%20Criostai_Eag1999.pdf)
Cassidy used both the correct version and an incorrect version of this phrase in his book. In his definitions, he misspells it as a rúin twice but then spells it correctly in the name of the song Siúil a Rún (though he misspells the word Siúil as Siúl, using the verbal noun instead of the imperative).
It should also be noted that Cassidy mentions ‘many songs in North American roots music in which the phonetically written Irish language lyrics are often treated as macaronic or nonsense syllables’. This claim is untrue but it also misuses the term macaronic, which refers to texts that use more than one language, not nonsense language.
cassidyslangscam 