Amadán na Míosa, Meitheamh 2018 – Joe Lee

Cúpla seachtain ó shin, ar an 22 Bealtaine, 2018, bhí siompóisiam ann in ómós do Joe Lee ag Glucksman Ireland House i Nua-Eabhrac. J.J. Lee and Irish History: Scholar, Colleague, Mentor an teideal a bhí ar an tsiompóisiam.

Mar a scríobh mé roimhe seo, tá obair mhaith déanta ag Lee. Is fíorstaraí é Lee, a bhfuil a lán leabhar agus alt den scoth scríofa aige. Ach, mar a dúirt mé fosta, bhí Joe Lee mór le cuid mhór daoine a bhí mór le Daniel Cassidy, agus sin an fáth ar scríobh sé an léirmheas dearfach seo thíos don leabhar How The Irish Invented Slang:

“In this courageous, crusading manifesto, Daniel Cassidy flings down the gauntlet to all those compilers of dictionaries who fled to the safe haven of ‘origin unknown’ when confronted with the challenge of American slang …The originality and importance of the argument makes this an exciting contribution to both American and Irish Studies. This is a landmark book, at once learned and lively, and quite enthralling as to how American English acquired so vibrant a popular vocabulary.”

Is raiméis an léirmheas seo, ar ndóigh, mar is raiméis leabhar Cassidy. Níl a fhios agam cad chuige ar roghnaigh sé tacú le píosa bréagscoláireachta mar How The Irish Invented Slang.

Is mór an díol spéise é go raibh beirt chairde le Cassidy ag labhairt le Lee ag an tsiompóisiam: 12.30 pm: Reflections of Directors of Glucksman Ireland House: Prof. Bob Scally & Prof. Joe Lee in Conversation with Dr. Terry Golway. Bhí Golway mór le Cassidy, agus scríobh Bob Scally léirmheas a bhí lán chomh moltach le ceann Lee ar chúl leabhar Cassidy:

Irish Americans especially will be delighted to know they have been speaking Irish all along in their slang and American English, while believing and bemoaning that they had lost their native tongue many years ago. With imagination and scholarship, Cassidy has restored this hidden treasure to us in a book that is filled with revelations, wit and humour.

Mar a dúirt mé, níl a fhios agam cad chuige ar roghnaigh Joe Lee agus a chairde neamhaird a dhéanamh den fhianaise agus muintir na hÉireann a mhaslú ar an dóigh seo. Is deacair é a thuiscint, go háirithe i gcás Lee, duine a bhfuil go leor Gaeilge aige lena aithint láithreach nach Gaeilge iad leithéidí béal ónna agus béalú h-ard agus pá lae sámh.

Rud amháin atá cinnte: cosúil le gach duine eile a bhí mór le Cassidy, is lú é mar scoláire, mar mhúinteoir agus mar dhuine de dheasca an chairdis sin. Níl a fhios agam an caimiléir agus bréagadóir é Lee, ach is cinnte gur thacaigh sé le leabhar mí-ionraic Cassidy, agus is teimheal ollmhór sin ar a chlú.

Sin an fáth a bhfuil mé sásta an teideal Amadán na Míosa, Meitheamh 2018 a bhronnadh ar Joe Lee, a chuidigh le caimiléir drochleabhar a dhíol agus nach ndearna turn láimhe ina dhiaidh sin le rudaí a chur ina gceart.

June’s Twit of the Month – Joe Lee

A couple of weeks ago, on the 22 May 2018, there was a symposium in honour of Joe Lee at Glucksman Ireland House in New York. The symposium was called J.J. Lee and Irish History: Scholar, Colleague, Mentor.

As I have written before, Lee has done some good work. Lee is a genuine historian, who has written a lot of excellent books and articles. However, as I have also said, Joe Lee was friendly with many friends of Daniel Cassidy, and that is probably the reason why he wrote this positive review for the book How The Irish Invented Slang:

“In this courageous, crusading manifesto, Daniel Cassidy flings down the gauntlet to all those compilers of dictionaries who fled to the safe haven of ‘origin unknown’ when confronted with the challenge of American slang …The originality and importance of the argument makes this an exciting contribution to both American and Irish Studies. This is a landmark book, at once learned and lively, and quite enthralling as to how American English acquired so vibrant a popular vocabulary.”

This review is rubbish, of course, because Cassidy’s book is rubbish. I have no idea why Lee chose to support a piece of fake scholarship like How The Irish Invented Slang.

It is very interesting that two of Cassidy’s friends were in conversation with Lee at the Symposium: 12.30 pm: Reflections of Directors of Glucksman Ireland House: Prof. Bob Scally & Prof. Joe Lee in Conversation with Dr. Terry Golway. Golway was a crony of Cassidy’s, and Bob Scally wrote a review which was as positive as Lee’s on the back of Cassidy’s book:

Irish Americans especially will be delighted to know they have been speaking Irish all along in their slang and American English, while believing and bemoaning that they had lost their native tongue many years ago. With imagination and scholarship, Cassidy has restored this hidden treasure to us in a book that is filled with revelations, wit and humour.

As I said, I don’t know why Joe Lee and his friends chose to ignore the evidence and insult the Irish people like this. It’s hard to understand it, especially in the case of Lee, a man who has enough Irish to recognise immediately that the likes of béal ónna and béalú h-ard and pá lae sámh are not Irish.

One thing is sure: like everyone who was friendly with Cassidy, Lee has been diminished as a scholar, as a teacher and as a human being because of that friendship. I don’t know if Lee is a fraudster and a liar, but he certainly supported Cassidy’s dishonest book, and that is a huge stain on his reputation.

That is why I am pleased to bestow the title of Twit of the Month for June 2018 on Joe Lee, who helped a con-man to sell a bad book and didn’t do a hand’s turn subsequently to rectify the situation.

More on Professor Joseph Lee

 

Among the numerous cronies who have boosted the reputation of the charlatan Daniel Cassidy and his absurd book, How The Irish Invented Slang, one of the worst is Joe Lee, a respectable academic historian and scholar who is connected with New York University.

Lee provided a gushing and ridiculously positive review for the back of Cassidy’s book.

“In this courageous, crusading manifesto, Daniel Cassidy flings down the gauntlet to all those compilers of dictionaries who fled to the safe haven of ‘origin unknown’ when confronted with the challenge of American slang …The originality and importance of the argument makes this an exciting contribution to both American and Irish Studies. This is a landmark book, at once learned and lively, and quite enthralling as to how American English acquired so vibrant a popular vocabulary.”

I have read some of Lee’s work. In spite of his idiotic support for Cassidy, he deserves to be respected as an historian. Interestingly, he is critical of the traditional nationalist narratives. For example, he is critical of the claims that there was enough food in Ireland to feed the population during the Famine years. Why he chose to take the reputation which he has acquired through decades of hard work and study and flush it down the pan by supporting a joke like Cassidy remains a mystery. There is no doubt that he knew Daniel Cassidy and many of Cassidy’s friends. Does this explain it? Was it simple nepotism?

Or was it pity? Did he choose to support Cassidy because Cassidy had no health insurance after the collapse of New College and was relying on the sales of the book? If so, this was a shitty thing to do. The Irish people are not responsible for Daniel Cassidy and we are certainly not responsible for one of the richest nations on earth choosing to have a cruelly inadequate health care system. If he wanted to help Cassidy, Lee could have remortgaged his house to pay the insurance bills, not sold out our language and culture.

Or was it a more selfish motive? Was Lee trying to stay on the right side of a parcel of cronies, men like Peter Quinn and Pete Hamill, who would do anything to avoid admitting that Daniel Cassidy was a fraud?

Of course, I suppose there is a possibility that Lee genuinely believed the praise he lavished on the book. However, I find this impossible to believe, because Lee is not an idiot. How could anyone who speaks Irish believe that more than a handful of the ‘Irish’ phrases in this book are genuine? (Of course, he’s not a linguist, but even so!) And we have to remember that Lee is an academic. He must have seen dozens, if not hundreds of theses and dissertations. He knows full well that any thesis or dissertation with standards of scholarship as poor as Cassidy’s would not be acceptable in any university, anywhere.

There is also another bit of evidence, posted by someone using the username ap-aelfwine on this forum: http://gaeilge.livejournal.com/175737.html

The bit of Cassidy’s work I’ve seen struck me as dubious,* although I recently heard a faculty member–a clueful historian who has good Munster Irish–at the programme I just graduated from say he thought C. was pointing in some directions that deserved exploration. It was in the midst of a reception–I didn’t get a chance to ask him more about it, unfortunately.

The clueful historian is obviously Lee. It doesn’t surprise me that he was still making broadly positive comments about Cassidy in 2010, because he had been stupid enough to put his endorsement on the book a couple of years earlier. But ‘pointing in some directions that deserve exploration’ (a view which is also foolish, in my opinion, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in this blog) is a far cry from ‘landmark book’, ‘courageous and crusading manifesto’, or ‘learned and lively’, never mind ‘an exciting contribution to both American and Irish Studies’. Yet Lee’s review still stands on the back of every copy of this ludicrous turd of a book. No doubt many people have been conned into believing that Cassidy’s work is a genuine piece of scholarship because of Lee’s endorsement and his continued refusal to set the record straight.

Or could it just be that Lee is a victim of that old enemy of rationality, the arrogance and hubris that so frequently goes with titles like Professor and Senator, the feeling that who you are makes you above the ordinary decencies that lesser folk have to live with?

Who knows? Who cares? Integrity is a precious commodity. Life is far too short to waste on people who are prepared to squander their reputation on a putz like Cassidy, whatever bizarre motive they had for doing so.

A Night Out For The Cronies

It has been several months now since my last contribution, so I thought it was high time I gave a brief update. Cassidy’s ridiculous book is still being sold on Amazon. Most of the time, the sales are sluggish, but occasionally some poor schmuck, impressed by the rave reviews from Cassidy’s crony friends, buys a few copies for his relatives and the book’s rating goes up again.

I found this picture on line. Here we see several of the worst of Cassidy’s cronies at a night out in New York in April. There is Peter Quinn, Joe Lee and Terry Golway, all of whom were quite happy to praise and support this crap, in spite of the fact that it is obvious nonsense. As far as I am aware, none of them has ever recanted, retracted, repudiated Cassidy or apologised for helping to sell this garbage to unsuspecting people (even after it was revealed that Cassidy was an academic fraud with no degrees). Well, what the hell! It’s their reputations which are being dragged through the mud and the longer they refuse to do the right thing, the shabbier and more ridiculous they look.

Grant Barrett

Some people come out of the Cassidy affair very badly, while others come out of it very well. One of those who deserves special mention for consistently challenging Cassidy’s nonsense is Grant Barrett. Here is a short post from Barrett’s blog http://grantbarrett.com/crank-etymologist:

Crank Etymologist

Thinking phonetic similarities between words prove origin or relation is a common mistake of amateur etymologists, as in this junk etymology, where the author, a known crank who favors simplistic and unverified Irish origins for a variety of English words—because he thinks American and English lexicographers have an anti-Irish bias—posits that bunkum comes from a buanchumadh, an Irish-Gaelic word he says means “perpetual invention, endless composition (of a story, poem, or song), a long made-up story, fig. a shaggy dog tale.” Of course, he provides no written citations of the word in English-language contexts. He’s got bupkus to prove his claim.

The author, Daniel Cassidy, used to post his rubbish to the email list of the American Dialect Society, but when his rickety logic and dubious scholarship couldn’t withstand the scrutiny of interested scholars and dilettantes, he took his quackery other places to people who don’t know any better.

Posted July 3, 2006

On a different forum, http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/663/, Barrett was attacked by Cassidy (under a false ‘sockpuppet’ identity)  for having the temerity to pour scorn on Cassidy’s fake derivations:

“Barrett’s quote ‘s cam e (it is a fraud, a trick). Barrett the Parrott also claims to be Irish. So what. So is Ian Paisley. As to Munster derivations, Glencolumcille is in Donegal and Cassidy’s grandparent’s spoke Donegal Irish.  Barrett the Parrott is an Anglophile hack whose boring books are in the  basement of Amazon.com and in the remainder baskets of most bookstores. Before you believe a focal (word) out of  Grant Parrots’ gob ( beak, mouth), check out these reviews. Barret the Parrot had better kiss the toin (buttocks) of his publishers at Oxford. With his books down around 270,000 and 600,000 on Amazon, whereas Cassidy’s book is in 5th reprint in 7 months and just won an American Book Award.

Is it a twerp (duirb, a worm)? Is it a dork (dorc, a dwarf)? Or is it Barrett the Parrot? No it’s “Superscam” (aka Barret the English  Parrott) and his phoney made-up quotes.

Here are REAL QUOTES that haven’t been hahahahaha deleted hahahahahahaha.

Believe Barrett the Parrott (AKA Superscam) or Dr. Joe Lee, who is a native Irish speaker and the Director of Irish Studies at NYU? Professor Lee is one of the foremost scholars in the field of Irish Studies in the US and Ireland.”

Cassidy then goes on to reel off a favourable comment from Joe Lee about Cassidy’s book. Why Joe Lee (an Irish speaker) chose to support this ridiculous book when he must have known that it is packed full of nonsense is between him and his conscience. People like Barrett come out of this well because they stood up for the truth, the facts, and the right of ordinary people not to be conned by cranks like Cassidy. They deserve our support, our respect and our thanks.