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.
This is familiar in Hiberno-English slang and is also found in other dialects of English. You could chide a child by calling them a bad rip. This is an expression that goes back to the 18th century and is believed to be a short form of the word reprobate.
While there is a word rob, which is used in Munster dialects of Irish for a pet animal, there is no evidence of its use with children or indeed with humans. Cassidy copied some definitions from a dictionary but of course, Cassidy spoke no Irish and had no idea how the word (or indeed any Irish word) was used in real discourse.
cassidyslangscam 