It’s Official – Mazel Tov is Irish Too!

For centuries, people have believed that Mazel Tov is Hebrew and an exclusively Jewish expression. Now an Irish-American academic has thrown down the gauntlet to this biased scholarship which refuses to give Irish culture its rightful place at the centre of the universe.

Brendan Patrick Gurne, Professor of Creative Etymology at the newly-founded Irish Milesian Academy For Intellectual Arts (IrishMAFIA) could not hide his delight when he spoke to our correspondent.

“The Academy was founded last year with funding from Celtic Research On New York (CRONY) to continue the research of the late Daniel Cassidy into the Irish influence on American speech. This is our first important breakthrough. We have checked it with our extensive library and both of the books are in full agreement. Also our special Irish language consultant, the guy in the Blarney Stone Bar who says he speaks Irish, concurs with our findings.”

“The Irish word asal means donkey and tofa means chosen. Therefore the phrase m’asal tofa means ‘my chosen donkey’. This seems to go back to the old days when donkey racing was a common activity in Ireland. When someone was lucky and won a race, they used to shout m’asal tofa! When large numbers of Irish speakers came to New York in the 1840s, Jewish people heard the expression and adopted it.”

Another Irish American who is delighted with the revelation is John Weeney of the SoLo Dalliance.

“It stands to reason that these people are right. They’re friends of mine! You only have to look at the nonsense given out by the traditional Anglophile linguists. They say that it comes from two Hebrew words meaning ‘planet good’! It doesn’t even make sense! I think all these linguists in their ivory towers should go off in a rocket and find a better planet and leave us working stiffs down here with our feet on the ground!” he guffawed, smugly. “Anyone who refuses to believe that Mazel Tov is derived from Irish donkey-racing slang and accepts the discredited Hebrew origin is simply a self-hating Irishman.”

Professor Gurne says that they are working on hundreds of other words now.

“We hope to have Irish derivations for kimono, blitzkrieg and mariachi very soon!” he said. “Watch this space!”

A number of people have commented on the revelation.

“Oy vey, voss far a mishegoss!” (I endorse this message!) said Rabbi Samuel Tishbein.

“Tha è sin glè mhath!” said Dizzy Gillespie, channelled from beyond the grave by internationally renowned medium Madam Bletherovsky.

“Daniel Cassidy was a god, a champion, a muse, an idol, a star, a force of nature, the greatest intellectual since Plato. At last his genius is beginning to bear fruit! Mazel Tov, Danny Boy!” said Peter Quint, Professional Irish-American.

“What do I think? I don’t know. Ask Peter Quint or Mallarkey McQuart!” said Ned Lunch, writer and fighter.

“This is a great claim altogether, a wonderful claim. Sure, it’s like Danny was still here beside me sharing a bit o’ the old crack. Now, where’s the buffet?” said writer Mallarkey McQuart, brother of the more famous.

“THIS IS A MAJOR REVULSION IN ENTOMOLOGY. ITS THE BIGEST THING SINSE COPPERKNICKERS,” said some guy on the Internet with a tinfoil hat.

A Cold Snap

We have recently had something of a cold snap here in Ireland, though the ‘worst winter in living memory’ promised by the Express or Mail or whichever English rag it was has failed to materialise, just as it fails to materialise almost every winter. However, the cold snap got me thinking about that word snap. I said back in July 2013 in the post titled Did Cassidy ever get it right? that I thought there was some chance the word snap as in a cold snap comes from Irish, though I said I wasn’t sure.

So, does snap come from Irish? Well, there is no doubt that snap is used in this way in Irish. Dinneen’s Irish dictionary gives various meanings for snab, including a snap, an end or fragment, a spell or turn (cf. “a cold snap”). The book also gives snap with the meaning “a snapping, a sudden assault or seizure.”

The word snap is also found with the sense of a cold spell of weather in English. Its first recorded use in this sense is in the 1740s.

So, which is it? An English word borrowed into Irish or an Irish word borrowed into English?

The evidence is very clearly in favour of this being an English word in Irish for a number of reasons. Firstly, Ireland was subject to English control for hundreds of years and there are many English borrowings in Irish but relatively few Irish borrowings in English, so the balance of probabilities is in favour of an English origin. There is no evidence for the existence of the word snap in Irish before the modern era. (You can check this on eDIL.) Furthermore, snap is recorded in the sense of a snap or sudden bite from the 15th century, and it has ancient cognates in other Germanic languages. It is related to Germanic words like snout.

Once again, Cassidy got it badly wrong about this word.

Festive Fun – The Roast of Daniel Cassidy

At this festive time of year, it’s customary to roast a turkey, so I thought it would be seasonal to roast a certain turkey of a book written by the late, not-so-great ‘Professor’ Daniel Cassidy, with all the trimmings. So, here is a selection of some of the criticisms made of Daniel Cassidy since his ridiculous book was first published. Many of them have already featured on this blog but many of them are new here. Enjoy!

“Etymologies from Cassidy’s How the Irish Invented Slang are widely duplicated across the internet. However, many of Cassidy’s definitions have been shown to be wishful thinking or completely made up. Cassidy was not able to speak Irish himself and was unfamiliar with the grammatical rules. He apparently found words in Irish dictionaries that he thought had a similar pronunciation to English words or phrases with a vaguely connected meaning. He then claimed these English words to have an Irish origin even when the English word already had a well-established etymology.” – Wikipedia

“… it’s a white washing of white America’s real status in the U.S. My opinion of the essays of Daniel Cassidy’s that have appeared on Counterpunch is that they’re pseudo-scientific amateur attempts to prove that gaelic was behind things like African American slang, something that should rightly go to African Americans themselves and not to the Irish. If they were convincing essays I wouldn’t say that, but they appear to be on the level of the guy who’s trying to prove that Magyar, the language of the Hungarians, was the language of Atlantis.

Amazingly, some dude accused me of being racist towards Irish people for criticizing Cassidy.” – Lost Highway Times, John Madziarczyk.

“Suppose you hold some crank theory for which there is no evidence but which is likely to appeal to some specific audience.  Suppose, for instance, that you believe that Jesus and all of his apostles were gay, an idea that might appeal to some gay people (not me, but tastes and opinions differ).  You then write a book of stories detailing the hot hot man-man sexual exploits of these men, keying each story to a biblical passage.  You manage to get it published.  Does the New York Times then write an enthusiastic feature story about you and your work?  Do you win an American Book Award  — “the purpose of the awards is to acknowledge the excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing” — for non-fiction? It sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?  But Daniel Cassidy has managed something similar with his book How the Irish Invented Slang (CounterPunch/AK Press, 2007), which maintains that great chunks of English slang came from Irish (an idea that is likely to appeal to some English-speaking people of Irish descent), supplying for each slang expression a (putative) Irish expression that resembles it in pronunciation or spelling.  And now the NYT has (gullibly) celebrated Cassidy and his preposterous book, and the book has (alas) gotten a 2007 American Book Award for non-fiction.” – Arnold Zwicky, Language Log

“Breandan a chara, I organised an event where Daniel spoke a good few years back but was shocked to learn that he had made no effort whatsoever to learn the Irish language prior to writing this book. He had no grasp of pronunciation as Gaeilge at all. It could be an interesting PhD topic for someone to study but the book itself lacks real evidence. When I met him, he looked at my name tag and said “I’m not even going to try and pronounce that name” which I thought odd for an academic involved with Irish/English language research.” – Elaine Ní Bhraonáin, Comment on IrishCentral

“Evidently, there’s one born every minute. Cassidy’s book was a work of pure fiction. Essentially, what he did was go through an Irish dictionary (containing words that, as one reader below has posted, he neither understood nor could even be bothered to learn how to pronounce), and when he saw something that looked like an English slang word, he decided that it was the root of that word. Most of the entries in his book divide into two categories: (i) those for which there is no evidence whatsoever, and (ii) those for which there is evidence, and the evidence proves Cassidy wrong.

What’s more worrying is that Irish Central is reprinting this article in 2014, years after Cassidy’s work was comprehensively demolished. To have believed Cassidy in the early days after his book was published would just have been naive and sloppy, but to still believe him now, years after he was exposed as a fraud, is pathetic. It makes this website look like a joke. I don’t think it IS a joke, most of the time, but articles like this just make it seem like Irish Central is run by a bunch of amateurs.”  – Jim Clarke, comment on IrishCentral

“I have to say that the reception this book has been given shocks me. Why do respectable academics put their reputations on the line to defend something which is so sloppy and poorly-researched? Other people react as if ethnic pride entitles you to ignore the truth. The level of some of the comments I have read on different websites reminds me of the Columbus Day episode of the Sopranos. To those who will take umbrage at what I’m saying and regard me as a WASP/revisionist/communist/fascist/self-hating Gael/eejit, I just have one suggestion. Why don’t you look up buanchumadh on Google. Then look up some of the real Irish expressions used by Irish speakers to mean nonsense – seafóid, raiméis, amaidí. You will notice that there are many entries for buanchumadh but all of them – ALL OF THEM – are related to Daniel Cassidy. This is not the case with seafóid, raiméis and amaidí – they get lots of hits from lots of sources. This proves that those words are used by Irish speakers, while buanchumadh was invented by Cassidy.” – Seán, comment on Amazon.com

 

“Cassidy wrote this car-crash of a book without doing any research.  He based his conclusions on hunches and whenever he found an Irish word or phrase that suited his theory, he crow-barred it into shape until it fit.

This was very shoddy work by Cassidy, and even shoddier work by Brendan Keane for being naive enough to swallow this sort of buinneach.” – BockTheRobber, comment on IrishCentral.

 

“It’s fairly obvious Cassidy has farmed the fertile fields of his own imagination for this book. I am disinclined to believe he has any knowledge of Irish, other than he may have seen a road sign outside of Dingle on a foggy day in November. His etymology is laughably inaccurate, his leaps of logic (if they can be dignified as such) are appalling. Irish-Americans will probably love this book, as it allows a certain amount of ego-stroke, but anyone who has ever picked up an actual Irish language introduction book- or pamphlet, or answer sheet- will find the best use of this book is as a table-leg prop, or possibly an excellent source of kindling in emergencies.” – Kyle Lerfald, comment on Amazon.com

“While the conceit may be flattering to those of us with Irish ancestry, in reality this book provides very little factual linguistic information. The author is not a trained linguist, and seems to base his assertions on the mere fact that some words sound similar. For instance, using the level of rigor Cassidy uses, one might say that we say “hi” on meeting because we are wishing the other person the blessings of heaven (“from on high”). That’s the kind of reasoning in this book, and it is, at best, a good source of laughter at the author’s expense.” – C. Vermeers, comment on Amazon.com

“Tá mórchuid na sanas sin gan aon bhunús, agus an tromlach acu sin mícheart go cinnte! Seafóid gan amhras, ce go bhfuil roinnt bheag acu inchreidte. (Most of the etymologies are unfounded, and the majority of those are certainly wrong. Undoubtedly nonsense, though a small proportion of them are believable)”  Eoin, comment on Beo.ie

“While I don’t dispute the other reviewers’ claims that this is an entertaining read, unfortunately the information in it is simply amateurish and almost entirely incorrect. The problem is that the author is not using academic standards of comparative linguistics and has merely shopped around hoping to find Irish words that sound similar (or are spelled similarly) to English slang that he can just sloppily declare as the origin, without any sort of actual historical proof. In fact, most of the words he has chosen to feature already have been traced linguistically to well-proven origins that simply cannot be disputed… and in fact the author does not even try, he just ignores them.” – D.Norder, comment on Amazon.

“The weakness of his research and in his methodology is apparent to anyone with two eyes and a minute to crack open the book. That’s what makes this surprisingly positive profile in The New York Times so frustrating. A minimal amount of effort would have revealed to the writer than Cassidy’s arguments are without merit, at best the result of sloppiness, at worst a con job.” – Michael Patrick Brady on his blog.

“I really am reading this, it’s just kind of slow going… Hahahah, who am I kidding: I am never going to finish this book. I am having a hard time buying the premise.” –  Sara, comment on Goodreads.

“Cassidy launched this book at Oideas Gael in Gleann Cholm Cille this summer. He’s fun to listen to, talks nineteen to the dozen like only a native New Yorker can, and how can you not like someone who can tell a five minute anecdote that goes from a job at the New York Times to draft-dodging in Canada to writing a screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola without drawing breath, but when he explained his theory he was met with polite smiles. The book is great crack, but should be filed under fiction. Cassidy is clueless about Irish pronunciation, but that doesn’t stop him violently shoehorning every unusual word in American English into his theory, even those with established origins – mostly words that have their roots firmly planted in Afro-American culture, and some that he blatantly nicked from the Italians. Cassidy spent most of the time in the pub when I met him being corrected on his Irish pronunciation, and insisting after the sounds had changed beyond recognition that they could still be mapped on to his English candidates. It didn’t help matters that the locals noticed that when he did get something right, his pronunciation had a notable Munster bias. By the end of the night, we were making up words to give him for the second edition. Good crack, but don’t take it seriously.” Anonymous, quoted by Grant Barrett on wordorigins.org.

A Grunt From Under The Bridge

Over the last few days, a number of trolling messages from some idiot in New York appeared on the comments section of this blog. Now, a while ago, in answer to another dumbass in America, I stated that I would simply delete any further stupidities sent to this account without bothering to answer them. I was tempted to do so with these messages, but I have decided to answer the unknown troll in this post, not because I think that liars and fantasists have a right to an answer when they repeat the same nonsense over and over again and refuse to engage in rational debate about the facts, but because it gives me a chance to reiterate some of the many criticisms I have made of Cassidy and of his cretinous supporters in the past.

The troll, who calls himself Sean, states that Cassidy has considerable fame in America, as if I would disagree with this. No, I wouldn’t disagree. Cassidy has achieved considerable fame and his books have sold well. I have said as much in many places on this blog. I have also stated the fact that any fame and money which Cassidy has achieved from this book is undeserved, because he was an idiot who knew nothing about the Irish language or linguistics in general.

The troll also says that for anyone living in America for any period of time, and knowing its culture, the connections of the words are clear. It is hard to see what point the idiot is making here, apart from saying that I as a mere Irish person am unqualified to comment on Irish-American culture and should shut up. But what is clear is very subjective. You see, in the area where I live, there used to be a lady who wore fluorescent pink spectacles, pushed an old pram around and wore an overcoat covered with sheets of paper with strange and cryptic messages on them. The content of the overcoat was garbled but the upshot was that the extermination of European Jewry in the Second World War was not primarily the work of Hitler and Goebbels. Apparently this genocide was masterminded by the Everly Brothers. To this lady, this was presumably crystal clear. One person’s clear and obvious is frequently another person’s totally nuts.

Why am I comparing you to a mad bag-lady, my trolling friend? Well, let’s just take your comment about those familiar with the American context and analyse them from the perspective of an intelligent person (me) rather than an idiot (you). How exactly is the American context relevant? Nobody is saying that American politicians didn’t call their sidekicks ward heelers, or that an ikey heyman wasn’t a name for a handle used to fix wheels of fortune in fairgrounds, or that a policeman in America wasn’t called a crusher. These are facts. What smart people like me are saying is this: that there is no way that ward heeler derives from the Irish éilitheoir, or that ikey heyman derives from ag céimnigh, or that crusher comes from cuir siar ar. I know that these claims and virtually every claim in this trashy book are bullshit. I know that because, unlike you and unlike Cassidy, I actually speak Irish. Apparently, actually daring to know some Irish makes me a pedant.

This lazy, stupid troll also states that the majority of Cassidy’s words were given as origin unknown. I have dealt with this question in a post appropriately labelled Origin Unknown? The majority of the words given fake Irish derivations in Cassidy’s book are not given as origin unknown in mainstream dictionaries. This is a total lie on the troll’s part, easily demonstrable by checking the words in Cassidy’s book against the dictionaries. He also claims that those who attack Cassidy are Angophiles. Amazing how many of these Anglophiles speak Irish!

The troll also talks about my ‘mania’ about Cassidy. In fact, my mania is and always has been the Irish language and languages in general. I love Irish and I find the crap in Cassidy’s book a deep insult to all Irish speakers. The posts here are a minor hobby of mine. Even when I was posting regularly, I probably didn’t spend more than two hours a week on this. But they are two hours well spent, if it offends lunatics like Sean the Troll and makes sure that people have access to the truth. Nor am I jealous of Cassidy’s success as the troll claims, because Cassidy wasn’t successful. This book is a monumental failure, however many copies are sold to the ignorant and gullible.

The last of these three grunts from under the bridge states that I never print anything which contradicts my opinions. No, that’s right. Because there is no evidence contradicting my opinions and with respect, troll, I think Cassidy was great and you’re just an Anglophile Irish speaker who hates Irish Americans really aren’t intelligent (or even sane) arguments.

And with that, I am going to mark the troll as spam. Not only will I not publish any future correspondence from this idiot, I won’t even bother reading it!

Yup, I’m bad!

A Reply To Owen 2

In my last post, I criticised a message from a certain Owen Kelly, who trotted out the same boring, hackneyed nonsense used by every other Cassidy supporter. In this message, Kelly suggests that the Irish invented a new version of their language in America: “It could have been used to mean it back in the day but only in the Irish-American circles. Most of his slang definitions were supposed to have originated here in America but were based on localized and parochial use of the Irish language by earlier Irish immigrants and their non-Irish associates. Not necessarily mainstream and most likely never in use in Ireland. This might explain why it would not have been heard among Irish people in Ireland.”. I have given this some further thought and it seems to me that there are a number of points which need to be questioned.

Firstly, supposed by whom, exactly? Cassidy did not claim this himself. He never said that the material given in his book was a new version of Irish specific to the States and unrecorded. In fact, he tells us again and again that this is ‘what an Irish speaker would say’. For example, he says of the word cooze that ‘cuas is a neutral anatomical term in Irish.’ Not was – is. He even claimed (though not in the book) that he checked his ‘research’ with Irish speakers. Presumably, these putative (and probably imaginary) Gaels were supposed to be live modern Irish speakers, not long-dead criminal inhabitants of Hell’s Kitchen contacted using a Ouija board. So, people like Owen think we should take Cassidy’s claims seriously. But because Cassidy’s Irish phrases don’t make sense in real Irish, these people have decided that they are in a totally new American version of Irish. In other words, they have decided to shift the goalposts and claim things that Cassidy himself didn’t.

Secondly, these claims show a deep lack of respect for Irish. After all, according to these people, Irish was such a lame language that it simply wasn’t good enough to provide decent phrases for concepts like idiot, or grumble, or nonsense, or hundreds of others, so Irish speakers in the US were supposedly forced to invent a new version from scratch. I don’t accept any of this. Irish has plenty of good, expressive words and phrases like amhas, amadán, seoinín, glagaire, leá dia, scraiste, bobarún. Why wouldn’t at least some of these have been borrowed instead of or as well as this putative new-fangled dialect of the language?

And even if you choose to accept this nonsense about the new-fangled Irish dialect of America with its bizarre words and phrases like n-each and uí bhfolaíocht án, can you reasonably expect other people to accept it, people like scholars and linguists and dictionary-makers? Why should they, when there isn’t a shred of evidence for its existence? The Cassidy-lovers keep pretending that the lexicographers and scholars are the ones who haven’t done their job properly. The truth is that Cassidy was a joke as an academic. Any lexicographer or linguist or historian who put any of Cassidy’s unsupported claims into a scholarly work of reference would be failing to do their job properly, and failing massively.

It is nearly ten years since this ridiculous book was first published. To me, it is completely inexplicable that people are still pretending that there is anything worth arguing about here. Cassidy didn’t get it right. He wasn’t a genius. He wasn’t even possessed of basic, ordinary competence. This book is simply trash and anyone who tells you otherwise is either stupid, a lunatic or a con-man. Take your pick!

The Blether Region

I recently found an interesting item on a Northern Irish-based blog called The Blether Region. I have tried to reblog it but for some reason it hasn’t worked, so here is a link: http://scots-anorak.blogspot.co.uk/2014_02_01_archive.html The author is attacking Brendan Patrick Keane’s idiotic article on IrishCentral about Cassidy’s ‘research.’ Check it out, but here is a little bit of the article!

“The article draws on the book How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Counterpunch) by Daniel Cassidy, which has been roundly condemned by serious linguists. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of such claims is the serial refusal to present etymologies plausible to an Irish-speaker (Mr. Cassidy evidently not being one himself). The variant “Gee whilikers” is glossed as deriving from Dia Thoileachas, or “God’s will”. But ask an Irish-speaker how to say “God’s will”, and the answer is likely to be something like Toil Dé.

Once again, how annoying that Irish Central has seen fit to publish such claptrap.”

Absolutely right! Anyone who supports this rubbish should hang their heads in shame.

How Daniel Cassidy invented Etymology (léirmheas)

An-jab déanta agat anseo, a Eoin! Tá sé athbhlagáilte agam anseo thíos. Tá mé fíorbhuíoch díot as an chuidiú!

Tuairisceoir an Dúin

Tháinig abhaile an lá cheana gur aimsigh mé leabhar toirtiúil romham. Bronntanas a bhí ann. Cé go raibh trácht cloiste agam air ní fhéadfainn a rá go raibh mé sásta leis mar bhronntanas. How the Irish Invented Slang le Daniel Cassidy a bhí ann. Is éard a chuireann Cassidy roimhe sa leabhar seo ná gur ón nGaeilge a thagann stráicí móra fada de bhéarlagair Béarla Mheiriceá, agus an domhain ar fad da bhrí sin. Dar leis go raibh uisce faoi thalamh ann ag lucht an Bhéarla a chuir an t-eolas seo faoi chois.

Cuirfidh seo iontas ar go leor againn ó ní cheaptar go bhfuil mórán níos mó ná ‘smithereens’ agus ‘banshee’ tugtha don Bhéarla againn. Don té a bhfuil leathspéis aige i sanas focal tiocfaidh amhras air go mear an bhfuil aon bhunús le tuairimí Cassidy. Éinne le smeareolas faoi shanas tuigfidh siad gur gá bheith in amhras i gcónaí…

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Cassidy and Irish

I found a very interesting comment on one of Brendan Patrick Keane’s stupider posts on IrishCentral. The author, Elaine Ní Bhraonáin, is an Irish-language expert who plainly didn’t find Cassidy as impressive as the CCC (Cassidy Crony Club) would have us believe!

Breandan a chara, I organised an event where Daniel spoke a good few years back but was shocked to learn that he had made no effort whatsoever to learn the Irish language prior to writing this book. He had no grasp of pronunciation as Gaeilge at all. It could be an interesting PhD topic for someone to study but the book itself lacks real evidence. When I met him, he looked at my name tag and said “I’m not even going to try and pronounce that name” which I thought odd for an academic involved with Irish/English language research. Le meas Elaine Ní Bhraonáin

Imagine the arrogance! A person who is unable to read a simple name badge in the Irish language, and yet he thinks he is in a position to rock the world of Irish linguistics to the foundation! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. What a putz!

Hall of Shame Special – James R. Barrett

I recently came across another deserving target for my wrath, a book called The Irish Way: Becoming American In The Multiethnic City by Professor James R Barrett. It includes several pages of Cassidese nonsense like the following: 

“Corruptions of the Irish Gaelic language survived in the memories of old-timers and were refreshed by more recent immigrants. Irish words, phrases, accents and pronunciations seeped into the English of working-class neighbourhoods.”

Why am I angry about this?  Well, in some ways, I shouldn’t get worked up. There are things which are far more important in the world and I should watch my blood pressure and not allow idiocy like this to annoy me, but I just can’t help it. Here we have a career academic who quotes from Cassidy describing him as ‘linguist Daniel Cassidy’  Linguist? Cassidy was not a linguist in the sense of speaking many languages (judging by the book, he could barely speak English and didn’t know any Irish at all) and he certainly wasn’t trained in the theoretical study of language. Presumably this man Barrett read the book or at least looked at it. Didn’t he get suspicious at the lack of methodology, the lack of a bibliography, the fact that nothing is properly referenced? The claim that the name of a fictional character in an Indian poem by Kipling is really derived from Irish didn’t set any alarm bells ringing?

Apparently not, because James Barrett gives a list of words like slugger, dude, square, sucker, stool pigeon, squealer, swell, taro (I think he means faro, the card game, not taro the Japanese sweet potato), racketeer, scam and jazz. Of course, Cassidy claimed that all these words derive from Irish.  Readers of this blog will know that none of these words is really from Irish or Scottish Gaelic. And Barrett would know it too, if he had bothered looking these words up in dictionaries to see what real experts who know what they are talking about have said about them.

I mustn’t get angry … But, really! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? This man is a highly qualified academic but apparently he is so lacking in scepticism and common sense that he just buys all of this tosh from Cassidy as if it’s real, without questioning it or investigating it or confirming it, even by surfing on Google for a quarter of an hour. And remember that this book came out in 2012 (and is about to be reprinted – it will be interesting to see if it still contains the same crap about slang). This is too early for cassidyslangscam, but not too early for a lot of other people who credibly and skilfully demonstrated that Cassidy’s book is simply nonsense written by an unqualified con-man. (Actually I should rephrase that: Cassidy was certainly a highly qualified con-man but he was unqualified to carry out any kind of academic work.)

Worse still, Barrett’s book has been reviewed in all kinds of publications and by all kinds of people. As far as I can see, not one of them has picked up on the claims that terms like square and jazz and block come from Irish and questioned their validity. Not one reviewer has taken issue with Barrett using Cassidy’s book as a source, in spite of the fact that it is like someone including theories about aliens building the pyramids in a serious book on Egyptology.  

Is this really what we’ve come to, a situation where the education system is so bad that even highly educated people are completely unable to recognise an insane load of cacamas for what it is?

Hoodoo

According to Cassidy, the term ‘hoodoo’ derives from an Irish expression uath dubh, which according to Cassidy means:

 Uath Dubh, (pron. h-úŏ doo): dark specter, evil phantom, a malevolent thing; horror, dread; a dark, spiky, evil-looking thing. Uath, n., a form or shape; a spectre or phantom; dread, terror, hate. Old Gaelic name for the hawthorn. Dubh, (pron. doo, duv), adj., dark; black; malevolent, evil; wicked; angry, sinister; gloomy, melancholy; strange, unknown.

 (O’Donaill, 457, 1294; Dineen, 374, 1287; De Bhaldraithe, English-Irish Dictionary, 755; Dwelly, 988)

 Looking at this list of dictionaries, you would think that Cassidy had actually found the phrase uath dubh recorded in one or all of them. In fact, no dictionary records the phrase uath dubh. Uath is in Ó Dónaill’s dictionary, where it is described as a literary term meaning fear or horror (for literary, read ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘not in current use.’) It is also given in Dineen, where it is defined as:

            A form or shape, a spectre or phantom; dread, terror; hate.

 It is not found in De Bhaldraithe, which is an English-Irish dictionary and seems to have been thrown in to make the list of references look more impressive. Dwelly is a Scottish Gaelic dictionary and therefore quite irrelevant in this context.

 There is also another old-fashioned term uath, an entirely different word, which means the whitethorn bush.

 So, the situation is this. The first part of Cassidy’s definition above (Uath Dubh, (pron. h-úŏ doo): dark specter, evil phantom, a malevolent thing; horror, dread; a dark, spiky, evil-looking thing) was invented by Cassidy. And not only is the supposed Irish source of ‘hoodoo’ not in any dictionary or any other source, Cassidy mixes up two quite separate words and throws in the adjective spiky for good measure because a whitethorn bush is spiky!

 If you are sympathetic to Cassidy, you are probably saying, if uath exists and dubh exists, couldn’t Cassidy be right? Couldn’t the two words have been combined by Irish speakers to mean an evil apparition?

 I don’t think so. Even leaving aside the fact that uath was an old-fashioned word by the 19^th century, where is the evidence that the Irish ever believed in a supernatural being called the uath dubh? Why hasn’t this word survived in any books or poems or stories or songs? Why didn’t the collectors of Irish folklore find any trace of it? Why isn’t it as well known as the banshee (bean sí) or the pooka (púca)?

 Suppose someone decided that in English there was a supernatural being called a spritegoblin. Is it enough for them to prove that the words sprite and goblin both exist in English? Wouldn’t you expect them to find specific references to the compound word spritegoblin?

 Unfortunately, Cassidy’s book is haunted by hundreds of spritegoblins, made-up phrases which don’t exist outside of Cassidyworld.  Cassidy, on his own admission, spoke no Irish at all. He claimed that he ‘checked’ his words with a native speaker of Irish. Exactly how he did this is unclear. I have visions of him walking into an Irish bar, asking if anyone was an Irish speaker, showing the putative native speaker his list of words and asking them if they were OK, and then when they nodded sagely and said ‘Oh yes!’ he would buy them a pint as a reward. Maybe this is a bit cynical on my part, but  I can’t imagine that he did the thing that anyone would do if they seriously wanted to prove their case. I’m sure he never gave a list of words and phrases like uath dubh and sách úr to native speakers in a blind test to see whether they really are recognisable as what Cassidy thought they meant. Cassidy obviously preferred to include all kinds of rubbish and not check his facts at all because with even a slight scrutiny of his materials he would have ended up with a pamphlet rather than a book. 

 The origin of hoodoo is a mystery but there is absolutely no evidence linking it to the Irish language or to the island of Ireland. Unless Cassidy’s supporters can find even one reference to the uath dubh somewhere in the vast corpus of Irish literature, we can reasonably assume that it doesn’t exist.

 Chance of Cassidy being correct: I’ll be generous this time – 0.0001%!