Cassidese Glossary – Grifter

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.

Cassidy claims that this is another version of grafadóir. As we saw with the words Graft and Grafter, grafadóir means someone who digs over a garden or field and has no connotations of scrounging, money-grubbing or corruption. These meanings were invented by Cassidy.

Cassidese Glossary – Graft, Grafter

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 one of Cassidy’s claims that I found completely incomprehensible at first. Cassidy claims that the terms graft (as in corruption) and grafter (corrupt politician) come from the Irish words grafadh and grafadóir.

He claims that grafadh (which is pronounced graffa or graffoo) means “grubbing, scrounging; hoeing” and that grafadóir means “a grubber; a scrounger, a moocher; fig. a professional politician.”

In reality, grafadh means to hoe or dig or grub, while a grafadóir is a grubber or a hoer, someone who uses a hoe or a mattock to break up the top surface of a garden or a field.

So where does all the stuff about scrounging and professional politicians come from? Well, the only explanation I can think of is that because in English the term grub has connotations of scrounging and corruption, then the fact that the terms grafadh and grafadóir are linked to the English word grubbing (only in the sense of digging), then Cassidy felt it was justified to attach all the meanings of grub in English to these Irish words, even though it is quite clear that they refer only to digging gardens and fields. Applying this to other words, capall is the Irish for horse and must also mean heroin or any kind of opiate because the English word horse can mean heroin. Giota is the Irish for piece, but it must also mean gun because the English word piece means gun. Of course, this is nonsense. Capall doesn’t mean heroin, giota doesn’t mean gun, grafadóir doesn’t mean a money-grubbing politician.

Back in the real world, graft is probably linked to the British English graft meaning work, which is probably of Dutch origin.

Graft

Graft is a slang term for corruption in America, and in England and Ireland people generally mean ‘hard work’ when they talk about graft. The derivation of the term graft in this sense is unknown and it is also unclear whether it is related to graft in the sense of grafting something onto a plant.

Cassidy says that grafter is from the Irish grafadóir. According to him, this means “a grubber, a scrounger or moocher; fig. a professional politician”. This looks pretty impressive, until you start to think about it carefully and look for evidence. Firstly, I would have thought that graft was the basic word and that grafter and grafting are derived from it. Yet the word grafadh (pronounced graffa or graffoo), which is the activity, doesn’t sound much like graft, which has a very English look to it. There are lots of words in English with -ft at the end – loft, soft, aft, daft, raft. But none in Irish.

Then there is the little matter of the meaning. According to Ó Dónaill and Dinneen, the word grafadh means to grub or hoe, to dig through the topsoil and remove roots and stalks. It doesn’t mean to mooch or to scrounge and has no connection with politicians.

So why did Cassidy say it did? Well, probably because Cassidy was a liar and a fantasist.

He gives no references, so it is impossible to check if he had a genuine source which contradicts the dictionaries but I’m quite sure he didn’t. Some people  – especially internet trolls – seem to think that the system of referencing used by academics is simply an arcane and random set of rules designed to keep amateurs out and give the academics themselves an unfair advantage. As examples like this show, the system of referencing developed so that people can check facts and sources for themselves and to make it harder for people to lie by presenting fake information as fact.

All I can do in this case is stress that the Irish dictionaries do not support Cassidy’s assertion. It is true that the Irish for a hoer slightly resembles an American slang word for a corrupt politician. The rest of Cassidy’s claim is fantasy and the likelihood of there being any connection between the word graft and Irish is very, very remote.