NYT on Daniel Cassidy

[James Harbeck]

>FWIW, Irish "dearc" sounds a lot more like "jorrock" [djar at k] than
>like "dick."

That was my first thought, too. My second was, "Isn't 'suil' more
common for 'eye'?" In fact, in my (smallish, admittedly) Irish
dictionary, "dearc" is only listed as a verb (meaning "look"), and
"suil" is the entry for "eye" (there's an accent on the u, but I'm on
a Mac and am worried that there will be a character set issue for
PC-based readers).

I'm put in mind of something that was exceprted in Harper's a decade
or so ago. Some guy had taken a piece of writing by, I think it was,
Lewis Carroll and had "proven" that the author was Jack the Ripper by
-- get this -- anagramming the excerpt into a rambling, oddly phrased
confession. We're talking about something on the order of 100 words
here, maybe more. That's the best part of 1000 letters. Anagrammed,
not with some special pattern or cipher, just anagrammed, grab and
shuffle. It will come as no surprise that in a subsequent issue there
was a letter published that anagrammed this "scholar's" article into
a confession of the same and more heinous crimes!

James Harbeck.

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