Boogaloo

A recent exchange with one of Cassidy’s supporters on the comments section of this blog (which I have since removed) had one useful outcome, as I realised that my treatment of Cassidy’s claims about the origins of the word boogaloo were not detailed enough.

The origins of boogie are mysterious enough. The known facts are that boogie was originally recorded in 1917 as a term for a rent party. Among poor black people, when they were unable to make the rent, they had a party (with alcohol during Prohibition) as well as music to raise the money to keep them from eviction. According to the excellent Etymonline, a song title “That Syncopated Boogie-boo” first appears in 1912. The style of music known as boogie or boogie-woogie dates back to 1928. The term boogaloo is quite late, being recorded first in the 1960s.

Cassidy ignores these subtleties and claims that the word boogie is from the Irish bogadh. He doesn’t mention boogie-woogie (because he can’t twist it into an ‘Irish’ form) but emphasises the late word boogaloo.

Bogadh is an Irish verbal noun. Its main meaning in modern Irish is ‘to move’. Because of this, Cassidy doesn’t mention the rent party origin, emphasising instead the meanings of dancing and movement. The word bogadh is a bad match in terms of sound. Bogadh is pronounced boggoo in the north and bogga in southern Irish.

As we have said, boogaloo is a very late development of the word boogie. Cassidy claims that it comes from an ‘Irish’ phrase bogadh luath. The word luath has the primary meaning of early, but can also mean fast. Because of this ambiguity, it is unlikely that it would be used in phrases like this rather than a word that unambiguously means fast, like gasta, tapa or mear.

To convince ignorant and gullible people that bogadh luath is an Irish phrase, Cassidy gives several examples of sentences using it. He claims that Níl bogadh luath ann means ‘he is unable to move fast’, while according to him, bogadh luath as áit means ‘to move fast out of a place; to boogaloo out of a joint’. Where did these examples of bogadh luath in use come from?

The answer, of course, is that they are crude fakes manufactured by Cassidy. He copied two phrases from Ó Dónaill’s dictionary, Níl bogadh ann and bogadh as áit, and then randomly stuck the word luath into them and pretended that they would make sense.

In fact, Níl bogadh ann is an all-or-nothing kind of a phrase. The best comparison would be expressions like the English ‘There wasn’t a peep out of him’. Just because you can say that doesn’t mean you can say ‘There wasn’t a big peep out of him’ if he spoke a little bit.

As for bogadh luath as áit, if you said ‘they moved quickly out of the house’, you would have to say bhog siad (or bhogadar) as an áit GO luath. You need the adverbial particle go. People don’t bogadh luath or dul gasta or teacht réidh in Irish. Of course, Cassidy was completely ignorant of the Irish language and wouldn’t have had a clue what was right and what was wrong, either in terms of Irish grammar or personal morality.

Daniel Cassidy – A Study in Dishonesty

People have frequently visited this site and deposited hostile comments, usually without bothering to read the evidence first. Occasionally, I have answered these criticisms, which is usually a mistake. The debates can get very heated, on both sides, and the critics are usually totally unwilling to take the evidence on board or deal with it in a rational way.

One of the main criticisms tends to be that Cassidy was honest and that my depiction of him as a con-man and a fraud is misplaced. According to these people, Cassidy’s book of fantasy etymologies was basically well-intentioned, an interesting attempt but Cassidy ‘overreached’ a little so the core of truth has to be sifted out of less believable material. This is utter nonsense.

As I have shown on this blog, there is no core of truth in Cassidy’s work. Cassidy certainly tapped into a number of common folk-etymologies linking English words to the Irish language and he probably obtained these through an Irish-language learners’ forum he used. This gave him words like twig and dig, say uncle, longshoreman, phoney, pet. All of these have been dealt with in great detail and have nothing to do with Cassidy. (Some of them like twig from tuig and phoney from fainne are certainly possible, while others like longshoreman are very unlikely.) He then set to work looking for further words and phrases derived from Irish. In doing this, he tried to claim links between words like case as in case the joint and Irish casadh, gump and Irish colm and a host of other ludicrously improbable etymologies. He deliberately ignored any alternative derivations or anything that did not confirm his ridiculous hunches.  For example, he claimed that swoon comes from Irish suan, meaning sleep. Sounds convincing, except that swoon has an impeccable genealogy in English going back to Anglo-Saxon, so the similarity with suan is pure coincidence.

However, if he had stuck to single words like this, his book would still have been a pamphlet, so he made up lots of ridiculous phrases like béal ónna, uath dubh, uath-anchor, gus óil, éamh call, árd-iachtach-tach, sách úr etc. etc. Hardly any of the phrases in Cassidy’s book are genuine Irish. The vast majority are the most imbecilic concoctions. As David L. Gold has pointed out, Cassidy’s contribution to the study of etymology was less than zero, because not only did he fail to produce any genuinely valid or potentially interesting derivations, he muddied the water by producing hundreds of entirely fake ‘Irish’ phrases which are still doing the rounds on the Internet.

If that weren’t enough, there are also huge questions to be answered about Cassidy’s academic record.  When I started this blog in 2013, I still thought Cassidy had a university degree. This in itself would raise questions because you would normally expect a university lecturer to have at least a Master’s and often a doctorate. However, Cassidy’s sister Susan (no fan of her brother) told me that he had flunked his Cornell degree in 1965. This was confirmed by the Cornell registrar, Cassie Dembosky. In other words, there is not a shred of evidence that Cassidy had any qualifications at all, so it is hard to see how he managed to work for twelve years as a university lecturer. The only explanation, as far as I can see, is that he lied about his qualifications.

There are other strong indications of Cassidy’s dishonesty. He left reviews of his book on line using sockpuppet identities, which is not only highly unethical, the way it was done was incredibly incompetent. You would be in no doubt reading these fake reviews that Cassidy was the author.

Other details of his biography also raise questions. He was apparently working in the newsroom of the New York Times when JFK was shot. Except in reality, he didn’t work there until two years after Kennedy died.

Everything about this man is dodgy, suspect, hooky. His American and Irish cronies, lackeys and enablers can deny the truth as much as they want. It remains the truth. What is important to me is to get the message across that Cassidy knew nothing about Irish and that most of his claims are based on made-up expressions which clearly demonstrate Cassidy’s profound lack of respect for the Irish language and the people who speak it.

The Glossary Is Finished

With the entry on Yellow, I have finally completed the Cassidese Glossary. This means that every single word in the glossary which constitutes the bulk of Cassidy’s book has been covered. The T, U, W and Y section contained only 21 entries. Added to the previous total of 465, we now have 486 entries in the Glossary.

The principal claim made by Daniel Cassidy was that Anglophile scholars who hate Irish had decided to exclude Gaelic derivations from the dictionaries out of sheer bigotry. There were, according to Cassidy, hundreds if not thousands of words and phrases of Irish origin in English that these so-called scholars had missed because of their intolerance and bias.

In assessing Cassidy’s claims, we need to establish clear criteria. Firstly, the claims made need to be correct. In other words, the Irish candidate words or phrases need to be close to the English in terms of sound and meaning, and that similarity has to be because they were borrowed from Irish into English, not because they were borrowed from English into Irish or from some third language into both. Secondly, they have to be derivations that appear FIRST in Cassidy’s work.

In some cases, Cassidy claimed that individual Irish words resemble English words in sound and meaning. In most cases, these English words sound little like Cassidy’s Irish candidates, as in the case of swank deriving from somhaoineach or swell deriving from sóúil. In both of these cases, and in many others, the real origins are well-known and have nothing to do with Irish. Cassidy also fails to explain how words could have been transmitted from generation to generation orally in such a mangled form and indeed, this is not what we find in genuine cases. Banshee sounds like bean sí, clabber sounds like clábar, shebeen sounds like sibín.

Of course, there are a small number of genuine Irish or Scottish Gaelic terms in Cassidy’s book, literary phrases like avoorneen and machree, slang terms like puss in sourpuss or slew as in a slew of claims. In total, there are about thirty Irish words, two Scottish Gaelic ones, and two from the Irish traveller language known as Gammon or Shelta in the glossary. All of these words are included in mainstream dictionaries and their Gaelic etymologies are accepted by those dictionaries.

However, as you can see from the posts on the Cassidese Glossary, most of Cassidy’s claims are not individual words in Irish that sound anything like individual words in English. Many of them, and probably the majority, are made-up phrases. For example, according to Cassidy, a top banana is a baothán nathánach (an aphoristic simpleton, no less!) Gibberish is from geab ar ais, gab back. Baloney, says Cassidy, is from béal ónna meaning simple mouth or nonsense. A sucker is from the phrase sách úr, supposedly meaning a fresh well-fed person and thus a sucker. Wanker supposedly comes from uath-anchor, meaning spontaneous abuse. The book is peppered with invented, fantasy nonsense like this, for which there is absolutely no evidence at all.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Cassidy produced a work of such colossal dishonesty, as dishonesty was his default position. This was a man who flunked his degree at Cornell in 1965, yet thirty years later he suddenly cropped up teaching in a university in California claiming to be a graduate of Cornell and Columbia. Just think about that for a minute. There are already plenty of people better qualified than Daniel Cassidy working as baristas and shop assistants and clerks, both here in Europe and in the USA. In the wake of the current Covid-19 crisis, there will be many more. Cassidy claimed to be a socialist and a radical but he put his own interests ahead of his principles time and time again. This worthless piece of trash belonged in a prison, not a college, and though it may be too late to make him pay for his criminal behaviour, we can certainly name and shame the people and institutions who continue to lie in his defence.

Some people will continue to use the ‘real criminals’ argument, saying that there are more important targets than Cassidy and that we should attack them instead. However, as I have said in the past, this is not a two-way choice. Other people can go after the White Slavery Meme, or Creationism, or Ancient Aliens – and good luck to them! I have gone after Cassidy because I have a particular love for the Irish language and a general interest in linguistics.

However, I also have a strong conviction that stupidity should be challenged and attacked wherever we find it. If someone chooses to ignore the facts and believe that a sinister cabal of etymologists is trying to deny that hundreds of Irish expressions made their way into English out of pure Anglophile racism, that person is an idiot. If someone claims that Daniel Cassidy was a genuine etymologist and teacher, they are either a liar or a fool or a bit of both.

Our local Chinese takeaway (on restricted opening because of C19) was recently forced to close because of the abusive calls from morons who believe that the Chinese deliberately released Covid-19 to further their own economic interests. A phone mast near here was attacked by some dim-witted fruitloop who believed that Covid-19 isn’t a virus but a product of waves emanating from the 5G network. People who haven’t learned how to think rationally or distinguish between nonsense and facts are a menace. They need to be challenged at every turn by sensible and reasonable people, whether the subject is the Gaelic etymology of wanker or the prophetic powers of Dean Koontz.

Cassidese Glossary – Slogan

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.

It is well-known and admitted by all dictionaries that slogan is of Gaelic origin, though most sources rightly trace it to Scottish Gaelic. The phrase sluagh-ghairm or slua-ghairm (NOT sluagh ghairm – it is a compound word and therefore needs to be written with a hyphen) means call to a host and was the traditional practice of summoning warriors to form an army in the Scottish highlands. There is nothing controversial about this etymology.

Cassidy is wrong in claiming that this is an Irish expression rather than Scottish Gaelic, though the term makes sense in both languages. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence of the use of slua-ghairm in Irish. There is a word slógadh, which also derives from a variant of slua, which means roughly the same thing – it is used now as the equivalent of the English mobilisation.

Some sources claim that the word slogan derives from an Irish term sluaghán. This is given as a historical term (Hist.) by the lexicographer de Bhaldraithe, whose dictionary was published in 1959. However, there does not seem to be any source for this word. I cannot find any reference to it in Irish before de Bhaldraithe and I would presume that de Bhaldraithe probably realised that there was a link between slogan and slua(gh), so he invented sluaghán as a probable source, not realising that it really derives from Scottish Gaelic slua-ghairm through various manglings in English such as sloghorne. If anyone has any information that contradicts this, I would be interested to hear it.

Since de Bhaldraithe first used it, its spelling has been modernised to sluán in Irish, and it is found in modern dictionaries like focloir.ie as a translation for slogan alongside words like mana and rosc catha. If my theory about de Bhaldraithe is correct, this is what linguists call a ghost word, a word deriving from a mistake or misunderstanding, like the word cigire in Irish or gravy in English. (Look it up if you don’t believe me!)

Cassidese Glossary – Racketeer

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.

(See the articles on Racket above.) The development of this term seems to be that racket as in to make a sound (especially used as a distraction for criminal activity) became linked to words like rack (to put someone on the rack) and rack-renting (to extort rent from someone) and thus a racket came to mean a criminal enterprise. This then gave rise to racketeer as a word for people who run rackets. Cassidy ransacks dictionaries looking for obscure Irish and Gaelic terms like reacaire which means a seller and ragaire which in one obscure reference (primarily to Scottish Gaelic) also meant an ‘extortioner’, according to Dinneen. The word reacadóir (an alternative form of reacaire which sounds a little like racketeer) does not mean ‘extortioner’, in spite of what Cassidy says.

 

Cassidese Glossary – Racket (Criminal)

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 truth is probably quite simple. At some stage, racket as in to make a sound (especially used as a distraction for criminal activity) became linked to words like rack (to put someone on the rack) and rack-renting (to extort rent from someone) and thus a racket came to mean a criminal enterprise.

Cassidy claims that this is of Irish or Scottish Gaelic origin but gives a number of different terms in both languages with his chaotic and disorganised ‘system’ of referencing, where he gives all the references in a jumble at the end, so it is impossible to say with any certainty which of these terms Cassidy is claiming as the origin of racket or what evidence he has for this claim. For what it’s worth, here is Cassidy’s take on it:

Ragaireachd (pron. ragerǝċd), n., (Gaelic) violence; extortion, oppression, roguery Racaireacht (pron. rakerǝċt), n., dealing, selling. Ragair, n., an extortioner, a violent man, villain, rogue, deceiver; cf. reacaire, reacadóir, n., a seller, a dealer; an extortioner (Ó Dónaill, 988; Dineen [sic], 872 882; Dwelly 744.)

Of course, ragaireachd is Scottish Gaelic, not Irish, and it would be pronounced ragurrakhk, with a k sound at the end, not a d. There was very little if any Scottish Gaelic spoken in urban areas of the USA in the 19^th century, so it and Ragair are probably not relevant, even if they do mean what Cassidy said. (Extortioner does seem to be one of the meanings of ragaire in Gaelic.) Even if these were relevant, they don’t sound much like racket or racketeer.

Racaireacht doesn’t exist. Reacaireacht means selling, reciting or gossiping, none of which are appropriate, and reacaire means seller, reciter or gossip. Ragaire is given in Dinneen as meaning an extortioner but the reference is to the 17^th/18^th century Kirk/Ó Broin Glossary (Egerton 158) which is a glossary of Scottish Gaelic terms.

Cassidese Glossary – Racket (Noise)

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.

Daniel Cassidy, in his etymological hoax, How The Irish Invented Slang, derives racket from raic ard, a high noise. As we have said many times here, phrases are only ever borrowed between languages when they are clichés or stock phrases, things like bête noire or je ne sais quoi. Raic ard is not a familiar stock phrase, and it doesn’t sound much like racket (it is pronounced rack ard).

In fact, racket is an English expression, a version of an earlier term rattick. The word raic in Irish is probably a borrowing from some related English word or perhaps from (w)rack, a dialect version of wreck (as in the ‘rackers’ who used to break into people’s houses and smash them up during agrarian disturbances in Ireland), or the similarity could just be coincidental.

Cassidese Glossary – Plunge

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.

Plunge is apparently a hobo slang term for a hobo’s stash of money (according to Cassidy) and he also says that to make a plunge means to make a pittance through begging. I can’t find any confirmation of the first meaning, though I did find the phrase ‘a gut plunge’ which apparently meant to beg meat off a butcher for your Mulligan stew. In other words, plunge may not have the meaning that Cassidy ascribed to it at all.

However, it happened, I think it’s a fair bet that plunge is an extension of the English word plunge, which comes from Old French plongier meaning to thrust down. According to Cassidy, this is not correct and plunge represents the ‘Irish’ bail ainnis. This is not a real Irish expression, of course, and it makes little sense. Bail means condition, state, or prosperity, but it isn’t used for someone’s personal fortune or stash. That would be a word like taisce. Even if this phrase did exist, it would be a phrase of three syllables, while plunge is a word of one syllable. Cassidy’s claim is basically just a piece of unintelligent, random guesswork and is certainly incorrect.

Cassidese Glossary – Pill

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.

According to Daniel Cassidy’s etymological hoax How The Irish Invented Slang, the expression pill for a ball (especially a golf ball), comes from the Irish word peil, which means a ball. Of course, a golf ball resembles a pill, and indeed the word pill comes from Latin pilula, which means a little ball. There is no clear etymology for the Irish word peil, but it probably comes ultimately from the Latin pellicius (a thing made of skins). Note that no native Irish words start with the letter p. All words beginning with a p are borrowings apart from pus, which was originally spelled bus.

Cassidese Glossary – Nan

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 nan comes from the Irish word nain or naing for grandmother. In fact this is an English expression for “children’s nurse,” 1795, from the widespread child’s word for “female adult other than mother” (compare Greek nanna “aunt”), perhaps also influenced by a pet-name for Anne. As Cassidy says, there are words like nain and naing given by Dinneen in his dictionary, but they are not defined as “grandmother”. Dinneen says that it means a fostermother, while naing mhór means a grandmother (O’N.); he also adds the note “cf. Nanny and Nain, used for grandmother.”

The reference to O’N means the manuscript dictionary of Tadhg Ó Neachtain, which was written in the year 1739. In other words, this is earlier by several generations than the earliest reference to nanny meaning a nurse or grandmother in English.

In other words, this is interesting and worth investigating. However, it is also worth noting that Cassidy didn’t carry out any meaningful research on this word. He merely noted that there is a word nain meaning a foster-mother or a grandmother in Irish and asserted that this was the origin of the English term but without making any attempt to identify where this word came from or whether there were other candidates. And while the Ó Neachtain reference is early and interesting, there is not much other evidence for the word in Irish. It’s not in the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language. Furthermore, it occurs in other languages. For example, in Welsh, nain is the usual north Wales version of the word for grandmother, and it dates back to the 14^th century.

Personally, I doubt whether the Irish term is the origin of the English expression but it is certainly worth looking at in greater depth.