Cassidese Glossary – Frame

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.

There is really not much point in taking Cassidy’s claim in relation to the word frame seriously. Cassidy says that to frame (as in ‘he was framed by the cops’) derives from the ‘Irish’ phrase fíor a éimiú, which (if it really existed) would mean something like ‘to refuse the truth’. Both fíor (as a noun) and éimiú would be quite uncommon words. If you asked an Irish speaker how to say ‘deny the truth’ they would almost certainly say an fhírinne a shéanadh. As we have already said, it is very uncommon for phrases like this to be borrowed between languages anyway, even when they’re genuine phrases!

Then again, the word frame is so easy to understand and completely appropriate. The crime and its circumstances are the frame and the authorities take one particular mug and put him into that frame. Thus they frame him. It is a simple, easily-understood metaphor.

Cassidese Glossary – Dead Rabbits

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.

The amateur etymologist Daniel Cassidy claimed that the Dead Rabbits gang, shown in the film Gangs of New York as carrying a dead rabbit on a spike as a totem, really had no connection with rabbits at all and that this name is in truth a phonetic rendering of the Irish ráibéad, meaning a ‘hulking person, a broad-shouldered, muscular man’. To him, dead is an English intensifier.

There is no doubt that the Dead Rabbits did carry a dead rabbit into battle with them, or at least that this claim was made a long time ago. As far as I’m concerned, that is pretty much that, because once you accept that their name is connected to dead rabbits, any claim that the name is Irish becomes pointless and unlikely to be correct.

The word ráibéad is an incredibly obscure word, which is not mentioned in Dinneen’s dictionary, though it is mentioned in Ó Dónaill’s, where it is defined as ‘a big, hulking person or thing’ – not a ‘hulking person, a broad-shouldered, muscular man’. Ó Dónaill got it from an article in a journal which was an account of words from one parish in the west of Ireland. In other words, it seems to have been equivalent to the English term ‘whopper’ in the Irish of Indreabhán a couple of generations ago.

In short, Cassidy’s claim is nonsense.

Cassidese Glossary – The Clinic Kid

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.

The late Daniel Cassidy’s claim about The Clinic Kid in his book, How The Irish Invented Slang, shows the flaws in his work more clearly than most. The Clinic Kid was the nickname of a con-man mentioned in David Maurer’s book The Big Con, first published in 1940. Cassidy quotes from Maurer’s book and there is no evidence that Cassidy had any other source of information about him. Cassidy (on page 214) quotes Maurer as saying:

“The Clinic Kid has made a fortune swindling wealthy patients who visited a famous mid-western clinic.”

So according to Maurer, the Clinic Kid was a con-man who worked in clinics. However, Cassidy does not accept that his fondness for clinics explained his title of The Clinic Kid. According to Cassidy, in this case clinic comes from the Irish claonach, which means perverse or deceitful. Claonach is far closer in sound to the English cleaner. There is no evidence that the Clinic Kid spoke Irish or lived in an Irish-speaking environment. In other words, Cassidy’s claim is pure nonsense.

Cassidese Glossary – Boss

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.

The facts in relation to the English word boss are quite clear. Boss was borrowed into the English language in America in the 1640s from Dutch baas, a master. (People who know anything about the history of South Africa under the Apartheid system will perhaps remember the Afrikaans term Baaskap, meaning domination, which was used by some of the Afrikaner ideologues who supported that evil system.) Some sources think that it became common in the more egalitarian society of the colonies as a way of avoiding the word master. It then spread to Europe and was borrowed into Irish as bas by the 20^th century. Please note that bas is not the main or usual word for a boss, which is saoiste, or cipín (in Donegal) or geafar (a borrowing of English gaffer). There is no evidence of the word bas for a boss in the Irish language before the twentieth century. (It is not found in Dinneen’s dictionary.)

Cassidy misleads in his item on the word boss by pretending that the Irish term is of great antiquity and that it is the source of the English word boss rather than the other way round:

“Boss as a slang term for best or good became popular in the 1960s. But boss (bas, best) was old when the King and the Duke drifted down the Mississippi River with Huck Finn and Jim in the 1840s …”

A Quick Update

This is just by way of a general update. I am not planning to start blogging here again regularly, though I might try to put up a post here from time to time.

Firstly, the stats for the site have continued at a low but steady rate. We did have a peak in January when Cassidy’s nonsense was discussed on a forum for sceptics. They gave it fairly short shrift but one of them also happened on cassidyslangscam and put in a link. As a result of that, the blog got some of its highest ever figures.

Unfortunately, people continue to add positive comments to Amazon about Cassidy’s book. While some of these may be people who are a bit gullible and didn’t think to doubt the claims in his book, it seems clear that some of the people who have given positive reviews on Amazon and in other places are well aware of the dubious nature of Cassidy’s work and are essentially saying that they don’t care what all the experts think and that they think their opinion is as good as that of the professors in their ivory towers. The fact that someone spends decades acquiring a knowledge of language and the relationships between languages and the correct methodology for establishing links apparently counts for nothing to these arrogant stupid people.

So I will say it again. If you are a sceptic, then show your scepticism actively. We can’t stop foolish and unpleasant people from giving this book positive reviews but if enough decent, sensible people make a stand, we could certainly give it the negative reviews it deserves.

 However, on a more positive note, Wikipedia is now virtually free of Cassidese nonsense. One enthusiastic idiot had put dozens of Cassidy’s claims onto a page devoted to Irish-derived words in English but now, thanks to the hard work and good sense of Wikipedia volunteers, these stupid claims have been rejected and removed, along with many occasional references in individual articles like the articles on baloney, faro and jazz.