NYT on Daniel Cassidy

[Wilson Gray]

I agree with you WRT _súil_ and _dearc_, now that you mention the
difference between them. I'm working on the basis of what I recall of
an introductory course taught back in the summer of 1981 by one Séan Ó
Coileán, a native speaker of the Munster dialect. Though Prof. Ó
Coileán was a native of Ireland, he was nonetheless also a Campbell, a
surname derived from the Scottish-Gaelic words for "twisted mouth."
with which the good professor was afflicted. I went to high school
with a Cameron, which is from the Scottish-Gaelic words for "twisted
nose," though his name was Irish "Manion." If twisted mouths and
twisted noses also occur among the Irish, I wonder why it is that the
names describing these features don't also occur in Ireland. [Some
kind member of list has informed me that Mac diacritics do work, here.
I should have thanked him immediately. But, as is so often the case, I
put it off and now have not the slightest memory of who it was. IAC, I
now tender my thanks to whoever it was. I could look him up first, but
that would merely mean once more putting off my showing him my
appreciation.]

-Wilson

-Wilson

On 11/9/07, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
> Subject:      Re: NYT on Daniel Cassidy
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >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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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
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                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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