NYT on Daniel Cassidy

[Grant Barrett]

One of the sites that linked to my blog post about the Cassidy book
contributed this delightful tidbit:

http://www.tawnygrammar.org/notes/2601/so-poetic-and-so-obscure

Maybe Cassidy accidentally collected his Gaelic from an unreliable
source -- these things will happen:

"It was said later in the area that the gentleman was highly praised
for the lore which he had stored away in the hearing-machine that
night. He journeyed to Berlin, a city of Germany in Europe, and
narrated all that the machine had heard in the presence of the most
learned ones of the Continent. These learned ones said that they
never heard any fragment of Gaelic which was so good, so poetic and
so obscure as it and that were sure it was no fear for Gaelic while
the like was audible in Ireland. They bestowed fondly a fine academic
degree on the gentleman and, something more interesting still, they
appointed a small committee of their own members to make a detailed
study of the language of the machine to determine whether any sense
might be made of it.

"I do not know whether it was Gaelic or English or a strange
irregular dialect which was in the old speech which the gentleman
collected from among us here in Corkadoragha but it is certain that
whatever word was uttered that night, came from our rambling pig."

     ~ Flann O’Brien, The Poor Mouth"

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