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This is an outdated slang term for being adept or skilled at something. You can be a whiz in the kitchen or a whiz at maths. It is a shortening of the English wizard.
Daniel Cassidy in his etymological hoax, How The Irish Invented Slang, claimed that whiz in this sense comes from the Irish word uas, meaning outstanding, great, superior. Cassidy says that it is used as a prefix but apparently he didn’t understand what a prefix means. The word uas cannot stand on its own. It can only be used as a fossilised element in other words (like thuas, anuas, uasal) or as a prefix meaning maximum or upper in words like uasteocht (maximum temperature). You can’t say that someone or something is uas at a particular activity. In other words, from the point of view of the Irish language, this claim is nonsense.
cassidyslangscam 