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.
According to Wikipedia, in the US, the card game known as Faro was also called ‘bucking the tiger’ or ‘twisting the tiger’s tail’, a reference to a picture of a Bengal tiger which appeared on the backs of playing cards.
Cassidy rejected this (by not actually mentioning it) and claimed that the word tiger in this case derives from the Irish adjective diaga (pron. jee-agga or dee-agga), which means divine. According to Cassidy: ‘The Tiger (diaga, divine, holy, diagaireacht, a divinity) was the god of the odds.’
Dia is a divinity in Irish. The variant diagaireacht could just, at a pinch, be used for divinity, the subject of study (not A divinity), though the usual word for that is diagacht. None of these words has any close or meaningful relation to card-playing or Faro.
cassidyslangscam 