H and I

So, I have now completed another two letters in the glossary in Daniel Cassidy’s absurd book, How The Irish Invented Slang, and as with A and B and C, D and E, and F and G, I have prepared a short account of my conclusions in relation to Cassidy’s efforts.

There are only 31 words in the H and I categories. Added to the 219 words dealt with above, that makes a total of 250 headwords from the glossary of Cassidy’s book. As in the previous letters, none of Cassidy’s explanations is in any way convincing, apart from one that has already been mentioned, the supposed link between the expression ‘big bug’ in English and the Irish boc mór. However, even in this case, Cassidy totally failed to conduct any real research.

The rest of Cassidy’s ‘research’ in relation to these letters is the usual utterly stupid made-up nonsense that breaks the grammatical rules of Irish and stretches credibility (and sanity) well beyond breaking point. There is a lot of material in relation to these two letters that demonstrates very clearly how little Irish Cassidy had. And while it has often been claimed that Cassidy had native Irish speakers available to help him and to vet the material he was coming out with, it is quite clear that these claims are also nonsense. What competent Irish speaker would endorse árd-iachtach-tach as a piece of genuine Irish? Who would give the thumbs-up to a phrase like ag céimnigh? Almost all the Irish in this book is pure invention and bears no relation to the real language, which Cassidy, a loud-mouth, a fool and a narcissist, had never even bothered to learn before setting himself up as an expert.

This man was a disgrace. This book, which so many Irish-Americans and even Irish people have been fooled into thinking was a valid contribution to the history of Irish America, was a collection of utter nonsense. People can believe what they like about Cassidy. They can ignore this blog and all other evidence and claim that he was a genuine radical, someone who actually cared about the poor and oppressed. (While claiming to have degrees from Ivy League colleges to take a job he wasn’t entitled to have.) They can ignore the evidence that claims he made about other aspects of his life were also dodgy. (For example, that he was in the newsroom of the New York Times when Kennedy was assassinated, or that he sold a script to Francis Ford Coppola – though he actually mentions two different scripts as the one he sold to Coppola.) And they can stick their fingers in their ears and hum while they ignore the truth about Cassidy’s etymological hoax. But facts are facts. They remain facts, however many people choose to lie or disbelieve or pretend that they are untrue.

The facts are laid out clearly here. There is no hiding place for liars in these pages, which is why we never hear from the liars in California, New York and even in Ireland who continue to pretend that Cassidy was a scholar and an intellectual. They don’t bother challenging the facts because they have no facts of their own to offer. In the past, some people have claimed that Cassidy was controversial. The truth is that there never was a controversy. Cassidy’s theories were always obvious and indefensible nonsense.