NYT on Daniel Cassidy

[George Thompson]

A Google search for ""Daniel Cassidy" and slang" quickly lead me to a baffling web site called Wordie -- I haven't made any effort to unbaffle myself, however.  It does give a hopeful indication that there are doubters out there.

Someone signing "flannagan" posted

I fully understand the prejudice against these sort of books—the title of this one is kind of embarrassing. But there is some genuinely interesting stuff inside. When you look at all the old American slang words listed as "origin unknown" in the great English dictionaries, then take into account the millions of Irish-speaking immigrants who poured into American, British and Australian ports in the 19th and 20th centuries, then look at the striking phonetic and semantic similarities of the slang words with common Gaelic words and phrases in use at the time, then research the first published use of the slang words in question—a case starts to be built up that isn't easily brushed aside. And in most of the examples given in the book, the case for the Gaelic origin is a lot stronger than the alternative.

Someone signing "sionnach" replied

We're probably going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Ultimately my scepticism can be traced back to my professional training (I'm a statistician). From a statistical viewpoint, given the exercise you describe (trawling through words of unknown or undecided etymology and looking for apparent similarities to xxx-ish words, where xxx could be any language), it's a dead certainty you will come up with a list of apparent "matches", just by chance alone. Then, given the human tendency to see "patterns" where none actually exist, the so-called "matches" are given undue credence. It's the same kind of fallacious reasoning that causes people to find and believe in hidden codes in the bible.

http://wordie.org/people/flannagan?wl=10774


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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