LETTERS

Dave writes from Daniel Shays country in Massachusetts:

Hi Danny, Did you see the full page COLOR ad Chavez took in the NY Times declaring a new alliance between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the South Bronx? What a propaganda finger fuck to Bush. A 2 bit Banana is sending foreign aid to NYC poor . financed by Citgo . Now that’s wealth redistribution. What did you think?

DISSECTOR RAVE

When I was at Cornell, I admired a student poet who later became a roommate and has remained a lifetime friend. His name, Danny Cassidy, actually Daniel Patrick Cassidy, also of NY working class origins and a passionate activist in his own way.

Danny went on to work at the NY Times, become a singer, record a record, fight drugs and become a champion for Irish freedom. He later became a professor of Irish Studies at San Francisco’s New College where he fought racisim in the Irish Community, upheld class solidarity and made an amazing discovery, an oiginal discovery, that much of our American slangs has its origins in the Irish language. This discovery led Danny on an obsessive hunt for a secret language that had become like an endangered species.

At first I thought he was losing it and turning into a nut. But he persisted, and convinced me that this is part of our heritage and buried history. He has just pubished a book that has been hailed in America and Ireland. Its called Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads

Just listen to him, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. ..

“I don’t want to brag, which, by the way, is an Irish word,” says Cassidy, a Brooklyn-born former journalist and Irish scholar whose book on the hidden history of Irish slang has gotten him a pile of press clips from the motherland. “But this is absolutely true: My book has gotten more publicity than any other book in Ireland in the past 10 years. More than Frank McCourt, even. It’s actually astonished me. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads” has stirred up much sentiment from Irish and Irish American communities. Cassidy contends that many of our most common slang words have entered the vernacular via Irish immigrants and their children, who passed on bits of a language they never fully learned.

If Cassidy is right, he has solved a big mystery of American linguistics; namely, how it could be that so few Irish words made it into American English. By plucking words such as “scam” and “snazzy” out of old English dictionaries and comparing them with phonetic twins in Irish dictionaries, Cassidy shows how Irish words were absorbed into American English while the Irish themselves were assimilating.

“The language was so obscured,” Cassidy says. “It was the language of maids and laborers and politicians and gangsters. It was literally kept in the back rooms.”
Cassidy’s interest in Irish slang came by way of two flukes - a word he’s quick to tell you probably came from Irish. In December 2o00, a good friend died and willed Cassidy a number of Irish books. The only one he didn’t donate was a frayed pocket Irish dictionary, “Focloir Poca”; it was too tattered.

“I told my wife, ‘I’m going to throw this out. I’m too old to learn to learn Irish,’ ” he says, “and she was like, ‘Danny, no, you can’t do that. It’s sacred.’ So I said, ‘You’re right, and it might be bad luck.’” He began reading a few words every night from the dictionary, and some of them sounded eerily familiar.

He was five months into his search for more Irish words that surfaced in English when he had an epiphany, “the only one” of his life. He happened upon the word bailbhe,” meaning “a mute, silent, inarticulate person”; it was pronounced like his grandfather’s nickname, Bolliver, which had puzzled him for years. But now it made sense - his taciturn grandfather was a perfect bailbhe - and, as he writes in his book, he discovered that “we had never stopped speaking Irish in my family.”

“When I realized that if all their nicknames came from Irish words, I thought then it was possible that Irish Americans remembered the Irish language without knowing it,” he says. “That’s what opened the book up.”

Danny’s book was ultimately published with the help of Alexander Cockburn and Counterpunch. It’s a great read and a good example of what happens when you pursue your intellectual curiosity and, in this case, Irish American identity. Read it of you can… It’s also fun.

Have a great weekend. My heart is a bit lighter because we seem to have saved Mediachannel. Praise The Lawd and you our readers for responding in our hour of need. We’ll let you know more next week.

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