He's back!

[Baker, John]

        On the Irish Studies Program's faculty page,
http://www.newcollege.edu/irishstudies/faculty_irishstudies.cfm, Cassidy
is described as a film maker, musician, and writer - worthy endeavors,
but not obvious qualifications for an Irish studies program.  The page
links to a 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article describing Cassidy's
views on the Irish roots of highfalutin, abracadabra, duds, and swell.
The Chronicle is a newspaper of some prominence, and I bet most of its
reporters have dictionaries on their desks.  How can articles like this
be written without any reference to the different etymologies given in
dictionaries?  Even if you're still going to publish the article,
wouldn't you want to have Cassidy's explanation of why he's right and
the dictionaries are wrong?

        The faculty page also links to an article about the teaching of
the Irish language.  In the midst of some more plausible claims about
the Irish language (that verbs come first, adjectives follow nouns, and
so forth), we see the claim that there are no words for "yes" or "no" in
Irish.  Is this really true?


John Baker



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of George Thompson
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 11:11 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: He's back!

Many of us will remember the learned Prof. Daniel Cassidy, who a couple
of years ago frequently would post a message here stating an Irish
etymology for some 19th C slang word.  When these statements were
received as if they were hypotheses to be examined he became
obstropulous and eventually he left us.

>From the Fall program at the Glucksman Ireland House, NYU, Fifth Avenue
at Washington Mews:
October 19, Thursday, 7 pm  Daniel Cassidy: The Secret Language of the
Crossroad: How the Irish Invented Slang
Linguists generally hold that relatively few Irish words have been
absorbed into standard English. Daniel Cassidy, founder and co- director
of New College's Irish Studies Program in San Francisco argues otherwise
based on his research for a new book entitled The Secret Language of the
Crossroad: How the Irish Invented Slang which will be published in early
2007. Cassidy will make the case that Irish words and phrases are
scattered all across American language, regional and class dialects,
colloquialism, slang, and specialized jargons like gambling.

I do not as yet find this book in Global BIP.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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