It's not every dictionary you can describe as a thrilling read. But when I picked up Daniel Cassidy's How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroadsthe other day, I soon found myself reluctant to put it down. Compared with the OED, certainly, this is a page-turner.
Then again, as the title implies, the book is not just a dictionary. It is also an argument - a response to the historic refusal of mainstream lexicographers to acknowledge Irish influence on English. And in setting out its case so robustly, the title echoes the humorous hyperbole of another Hiberno-American, Thomas Cahill, whose How the Irish Saved Civilisation was a big seller a few years back.
Cassidy concludes his opening statement for the prosecution by page 73 and thereafter proceeds to a straightforward glossary of American slang words and phrases he believes to be derived from Irish. These include babe, baloney, bee's knees, cop, dig, doozy, dude, gee whiz, hokum, Holy Mackerel!, Hot Diggity!, humdinger, jazz, jerk, punk, razzmatazz, scam, swanky, top banana, twerp, yacking, and yellow. By the end of which list you may have concluded that, if the author is even half right, his title is a model of restraint.
Self-aggrandisement seems to come with the territory, anyway. As the book reminds us, the Scots, Scots-Irish, and Irish of the American south once prided themselves on the nickname "cracker": another word in Cassidy's glossary, meaning a poor, white southerner.
The author notes that in Irish, "cracaire" means "a boaster, a jester", and cites the following explanation of the Americanised term, from a letter written in 1766: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode." That a people famous - then and now - for talking (and for talking themselves up) had given so few words to standard English has long been a puzzle. That they had apparently given even fewer to non-standard English was an even bigger mystery.
H.L. Mencken's classic The American Language, published in 1921, trod some of the ground that Cassidy is on here. In one chapter, he even rewrote the declaration of independence in "vulgate American", replete with the double negatives he considered the vernacular's defining feature. But in acknowledging the influence of emigrants on the vocabulary, Mencken was struck by the lack of an Irish contribution. "Perhaps shillelah, colleen, spalpeen, smithereens and poteen exhaust the unmistakably Gaelic list," he suggested.
In fairness, Mencken went on to credit Ireland's much greater influence on US pronunciation and speech patterns, such as "a use of intensifying suffixes, often set down as characteristically American, which was probably borrowed from the Irish. Examples are no-siree and yes-indeedy, and the later kiddo and skidoo. . .The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration. The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives; bet your life, not on your life, well I guess, and no mistake, and so on. The Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the American heart."
Cassidy takes the case on from there, though his book fairly bristles with intensives too - a reflection of its subject matter. It is the nature of slang that it fills in the gaps left in the language by respectable society. And the grafters, grifters, finks, and phoneys that populate the glossary paint a picture of Irish emigrants' misspent but colourful lives in the backstreets and alleyways of big-city America.
The book's single most dramatic claim, probably, concerns that quintessential American word "jazz". Even Father Dineen, whose 1927 dictionary was lampooned by Myles na Gopaleen for the multidudinous layers of meaning it attributed to the humblest Irish terms, might be embarrassed to find himself called as a witness for the Hibernian origins of a word once so disreputable that it was in spoken use long before it was in print.
But he has been. Cassidy plausibly cites Dineen and other in support of "teas", Irish for "heat, passion, excitement", as the root of a term that meant sex before it came to be applied to the music form. If we can accept this, it comes as less of shock to learn that the classic jive-talking word "dig" - as in "you dig?" - may be derived from the Irish "tuig". And, explaining how two such disparate cultures might have cross-pollinated, the book has the great jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie recalling how black people near his home in Alabama "had once spoken exclusively in Scots Gaelic".
The "buddy" who might spare you a dime comes from "bodach" ("a strong lusty youth"), suggests Cassidy. And then there is "baloney". The author rejects the traditional explanation, relating to the dubious content of certain Italian meat products, as "a canard and an insult to the sausage makers of Bologna". The word's more plausible derivation is "béal ónna", meaning "foolish talk" or "blather", he insists.
Many of the words included in the glossary have hitherto been branded "origin unknown" by the mainstream dictionaries. In defining them as Irish, Cassidy is like an intrepid frontiersman, staking out his claim to a piece of the wilderness. There may be counter-claims in due course, and things may get ugly. But with his trusty De Bhaldraithe's English-Irish Dictionary, and back-up from Dineen and
Ó Dónaill, the author is ready for a fight.