Sanas of Sucker, 2005

[Daniel Patrick Cassidy]

Sucker
Sa/ch U/r  (pron. sawhk ur)
A fresh well-fed fellow. A  new "fat cat."
 
Sa/ch (pron sawhk): a well-fed person. A luxurious person. Fig. A  wealthy 
person. (Dineen, O’Donaill). 
Ur : Fresh, new, moist, tender,  raw
 
Nil truagh do'n sach sathach an t-ocrach riamh, 
the well-fed person  never pities the poor person.” (Dineen, p. 936). 
 
 
Reracinating the American "sucker" into the Irish language  reveals its 
hidden class aspect. A true Sach  ur (sucker) should never be hungry. Only the 
"well-fed" and  "self-satisfied" qualify. In Irish. 
 
Here are a few "suckers" from the Nobel Prize winning Irish American  
playwright Eugene  O'Neill, the son of the actor, James O'Neill, an  Irish famine 
emigrant, who had fled the mass death of mid-19th century  Ireland for Buffalo's 
disease-ridden Irish-American slum (saol  luim).
 
Here's a middle class sucker.. 
 
SID: “Yes, everyone knows you’re an old  sucker.”   
(Ah Wilderness, p. 26 .)
 
Sid is the brother-in-law of a small town Connecticut newspaper publisher.  
In the early 20th century, the educated American upper classes (airde  d'airde) 
 put pizzazz (piosa theas, pron. peesa  hass,  a piece of excitement) into  
their American-English with American-Irish "slang." 
 
 
Here's "sucker" in the 1912 NYC saol luim.

HARRY HOPE: “Cut out the glad hand, Hickey. D’you  think I’m a sucker? I 
know you, bejees, you sneaking,  lying drummer!” 
(Iceman Cometh, p. 654)
 
+
 
And back in middle-class Connecticut...Jamie is James O'Neill, Jr.,  Eugene's 
alcoholic self-destructive older brother. 
 
JAMIE: “...Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get  you nowhere fast. 
That’s where I’ve got – nowhere. Where everyone lands in the  end, even if 
most suckers won’t admit it. “    (Long Day’s Journey into Night, p. 161)
 
+
 
And then back to NYC and the 1920s, a decade, like this one,  that turns the 
words sach ur (sucker) upside down, in a world of fat  cat, self-satisfied 
upper-class grifters (grafado/ir) and hungry  working-class generic American 
suckers.
 
 
ERIE: “But hell, I always keep my noggin working, booze or no booze, I’m no  
sucker. What was I sayin’? Oh, some drunk. I sure hit  the high spots. You 
shoulda seen the doll I made night before last. And did she  take me to the 
cleaners. I’m a sucker for blondes.”  
(Hughie, p. 267)
 
It is the úr in sách úr that  keeps the “well-fed fellow”  new  and  fresh 
and ripe to be fleeced like a Donegal sheep. 
 
“There is a sucker born every minute,” Mike Mc Donald  (High King of the 
Chicago Gamblers), 1880-1903.
 
Suckers and Dead Rabbits
 
A “rabbit sucker” or “ráibéad sa/ch u/r,” means “a big, fresh well-fed  
fellow” and appears in amateur lexicologist, and warden of The Tombs  Prison, 
George Matsell’s 1859 slang dictionary, Vocabulum: The Rogue's  Lexicon.  Raibead 
means a “big hulking person” in Irish and sounds  like “Rabbit” to English 
speaking ears. It is the source of the phoney gang  moniker “Dead Rabbit.” Of 
course, there was no gang in NYC  called The Dead Rabbits. In the 1850s a “
dead raibead” was just  NY-Irish for a “real big lug.”
 
Sach ur spelled “sucker” is the last word -- as two disguised Irish  words 
-- in Eugene O'Neill's final play Hughie, set  appropriately in 1928.  A year 
of the Sucker --  like this one may prove to be.


Erie:  He clicks the dice in his hand -- thoughtfully.  “Y’know  it’s time I 
stopped carryin’ the torch for Hughie... He’s gone. Like we all  gotta go... 
It’s all in the racket, huh?”    His soul is  purged of grief, his 
confidence restored.   “I shoot two  bits.”
 
Night Clerk:  Manfully, with an excited dead-pan  expression he hopes 
resembles Arnold Rothstein’s    “I fade  you.”
 
Erie  Throws the dice.  “Four’s my  point.”  Gathers them up swiftly and 
throws again.
“Four  it is.”  He takes the money. “Easy when you got my luck –and know  
how. Huh, Charlie?”   He chuckles, giving the Night  Clerk the slyly amused, 
contemptuous, affectionate wink with which a  Wise Guy regales a Sucker ( Sách 
úr, a new  "fat cat").   (Hughie, p. 294)
 
Daniel Cassidy
The Irish Studies Program
New College of California
San Francisco
1.2. 05