Jasm/Jism/Gism

Tue Oct 16 17:49:19 UTC 2007

Most eloquent, Grant.

  JL

Grant Barrett <gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Grant Barrett
Subject: Re: Jasm/Jism/Gism
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On Oct 15, 2007, at 23:26, Baker, John wrote:

> In addition to his theory that jazz derives from Irish teas, Daniel
> Cassidy argues in How the Irish Invented Slang that jasm and gism
> derive from Irish teas ioma, which he defines as "an abundance of
> heat and passion; fig. semen." Google does not present any
> examples of "teas ioma" that do not come from Cassidy. However, I
> don't know how good a source Google is for Irish. Any thoughts on
> this theory? Jasm/jism/gism currently are in the "origin unknown"
> category.

That's the weakness of his Irish, too, that he's not working from
reliable source material. It doesn't require a fluent or native
understanding of Irish (which Cassidy does not have--this an
important point that he often lets go unexplained) to see that he's
taking words that have complex senses and cherry-picking the one that
most suits his purposes. The Irish definitions he gives are little
better than glosses and do not show a complex understanding of
context nor frequency, neither presently nor historically. He's done
no corpus analysis. At best, he seems to have plundered dictionaries,
and when it has suited him, he has adjusted his plunderings to make
the meanings broad enough to support his theories.

What he's also done is found writers of Irish heritage who have used
the English forms of the words, going by surname only in some cases,
in others choosing people who live or had lived or could have lived
in a region that was widely settled by Irish or Scots-Irish.

He's done little to verify whether those people he is quoting had any
knowledge of Irish, even just an old granny who might have taught
them a few expressions. He seems to be working under the assumption
that some Irish just lingered in the air.

Then in the cases that I have seen (I have not read this book
thoroughly), he has chosen as supporting evidence English-language
quotes that contain the *English* word under discussion. I have yet
to see a single one of his quotes include any form of the *Irish*
word in an *English-language* context, except when he's quoting from
dictionaries which, in all cases, are talking about an Irish meaning
rather than the supposed English meaning. Even in the completely
Irish quotes, the forms of the word that are cited are usually very
different from the form that was supposedly transformed into an
English word. Many of his Irish forms should be prefixed with an
asterisk because he has not found them in the wild but merely
postulated their existence.

To put it another way, he's failed to find early uses of the
transformed or transforming terms--that is, a variety of phonetic or
Anglicized spellings that resemble the terms as we know them today,
i.e., word forms somewhere on the continuum of change-- that might
demonstrate that they were earliest, or nearly earliest, used by
Irish-speakers or people of provable Irish heritage or in direct
contact with Irish people. His citation evidence is paltry and
incomplete.

The main thing that bothers me about most of his theories, besides
his overall unwillingness to express doubt and caveats about them and
his apparent inability to do the work required to falsify his own
theories, is that in cultural overlaps and contact situations in
which words are borrowed there tends to be written evidence of it.
This happened repeatedly with contact contacts by the English,
French, and Spanish settlers with Native Americans in the New World,
and it continues to happen where Spanish and English rub up against
each other today. So, there might be texts that show this happening.
In those cases, we might find borrowed words set off by quotes or
dashes, or explained as "as my gram used to say," or "as we used to
say," or even given plainly as a word from another language, and so
forth. Primary source material needs to be found and examined:
letters, books, diaries, what have you. Certainly, across the whole
of his book "How the Irish Invented Slang," there should be lots and
lots of this sort of "language contact" evidence, but I've yet to see
any (again, I have not read the book thoroughly).

Of course, if no such texts are found, or the words are not found in
them, then the theories are unproven, and that is that. Cassidy has
promoted his unsubstantiated theories so widely that he cannot back
down now without looking foolish.

Besides that, substantiation is a lot of work, and as we have seen
repeatedly, those would-be scholars who "cry Wolof" have little
stomach for the tedium required to prove their theories. Instead,
they do mini-book tours of Ireland where they are lauded by well-
meaning folk who don't know better than to trust.

For an example typical of his scholarship, see his claims about
"bunkum." He says that the congressman from Buncombe County lived in
North Carolina, which had a Scots-Gaelic and Irish-speaking
population, which, somehow supported by information gathered from a
2005 Scotsman newspaper article that said Dizzy Gillespie's family
from NC and Alabama were African-American Gaelic speakers, means that
"Buncombe" comes from "buanchumadh," which he defines as "a long made-
up story, an endless invention." His other evidence is three uses of
"bunk" in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, one from 1939 which has it as
"de old Irish bunk"--the oldest cite he has, 89 years later than
OED's first cite. He has no citations spelled "buanchumadh" at all,
neither in English nor Irish. Nowhere does he attempt to explain the
early expression "talking to Buncombe," nor the capitalization or
spelling of Buncombe in early uses, nor the existence of Colonel
Edward Buncombe for which the county is named. This is in the same
entry in which he casually throws in unsupported Irish etymologies
for "swank" and "to dig=understand."

By the way, there are a number of old full-text English-Irish
dictionaries at Google Books that might be helpful.

Grant Barrett
Double-Tongued Dictionary
http://www.doubletongued.org/
editor at doubletongued.org

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