A new book claims the Irish language gave America such slang words as dude, dork and jazz, writes Kate Holmquist
How the Irish language became American slanguage has become a passion for Daniel Cassidy, who grew up in Brooklyn, New York speaking "Irish" without even realising it. It all began with a pocket Irish dictionary, Foclóir Póca, left to him by a friend, Kevin O'Dowd, who died at the age of 37.
Cassidy, who thought he was too old to learn Irish, was about to toss the dictionary into the rubbish, when his wife, Clare, told him he couldn't do that to a book left by a dead friend. She suggested he keep it on his night stand and learn a word a night.
So that's what he did and before long, he had an epiphany. The words and phrases he'd learned as a kid in New York in the 1940s and 1950s - such as "in dutch", "say uncle", "dukin", "snazzy" and "dude" - were lighting up in his mind as he learned Irish words. Was it possible that "in dutch" came from "duais" (Irish for trouble) and that "say uncle" was related to "anacal" (Irish for mercy)? The more Irish words he learned, the more connections he found. "Snazzy" was actually Irish ("snasah") for polished, glossy and elegant. "Dukin" seemed to come from the Irish "tuargain", meaning hammering, thumping, pounding.
Yet while this made sense, the connections Cassidy was making went against the academic grain. It was well-known, Cassidy says, that unlike Italians, Jews, Hispanics, French, Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians, Native Americans and Asians, the Irish had contributed no words or phrases to the English language. Dictionary editors such as Noah Webster and James Murray believed that the Irish had lost their language "utterly, without a whisper or a trace".
Irish speakers had been absorbed so rapidly into the melting pot that their language was lost. But when Cassidy read his pocket Irish dictionary and heard phrases from his childhood, he began to ask "Did Irish-Americans remember the Irish language without knowing it?" He was reminded of a statement by René Descartes: "There is nothing . . . so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true."
ONCE CASSIDY DARED to question the "truth" that the Irish had contributed nothing to American English, he began to find hundreds of everyday "American" words that were actually Irish. Cassidy's grandfather, who was born in "Irishtown" in Brooklyn, was always called Boliver by Cassidy's grandmother and aunts. For Cassidy, the name "Boliver" sounded like some Park Avenue swell (from "sóúil", meaning luxurious, rich and prosperous).
In his dictionary, Cassidy found the word "balbhán", meaning a silent or mute person. He realised that this word fit his grandfather to a T. Boliver was a contrast to his brothers, who talked a lot of baloney (from "béal ónna", meaning foolish, humorous talk.) "And in that moment," Cassidy writes in his book, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads, " I remembered something that I had never known. The slang and accent of five generations and 100 years in tenements, working-class neighbourhoods and old breac-Ghaeltacht East River slums of Brooklyn and New York City had within it the hard-edged spiel (from 'speal', meaning cutting satiric words) and vivid cant ('caint', meaning speech) of 100 generations and of 1,000 years in Ireland: Gaeilge, the Irish language."
The early Irish-American settlers in New York, as portrayed in Herbert Asbury's 1927 book Gangs of New York and the 2002 Martin Scorcese movie of the same name, left a rich linguistic legacy. In studying those words, Cassidy found his "roots", something everyone needs to be psychologically healthy, he believes. Now living in San Francisco, Cassidy sees drug and alcohol abuse and the lack of direction among US youth as being directly related to a lack of roots. He says that Jewish-Irish, Afro-American-Irish and every other combination of Irish-American have a longing to understand their Irish origins. "When you lose your roots, you lose your soul," Cassidy says.
Cassidy graduated from Cornell in 1955 and went on to work as a reporter for the New York Times. He became involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement 10 years later and was arrested for demonstrating. He left New York and in the 1970s found himself working as a full-time musician, and then worked as a writer in Hollywood, with Francis Ford Coppola, among others.
Eventually, he found himself in academia, and he became co-founder of the Irish studies programme at the New College of California.
OF ALL THE hundreds of American slang words that he has traced back to the Irish language, his favourite is jazz. Ironically, the name is associated with African-American music, though the earliest performers of "jazz" didn't like the word. Jazz comes from "teas", a noun for heat, passion and excitement.
"Not a single musician in New Orleans - black, white, or Creole - used the word 'jazz' for hot music," says Cassidy, "until the Original Dixieland Jass Band (ODJB), a motley crew of Irish, Sicilian, and working-class white boys from the back streets of the Big Easy, hit the music-biz jackpot in March 1917, when they recorded the first "Jass" record in history in New York City: Dixieland Jass One Step and Livery Stable Blues.
"In the red-light districts of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, Chicago's First Ward, New York's Tenderloin, and New Orleans' Storyville, where the hot new music had been born, that old Irish word 'teas' also meant sexual 'heat, passion, excitement'."
One of the hottest sex words of the 20th century was jazz, he argues. He's traced the use of "jazz" as a synonym for sex as far back as 1899. Musician Richard Holbrooke wrote in 1974: "I shall be glad to swear on oath before a notary public that 'jazz' as a sex word was not only used in San Francisco before the earthquake and fire, but that it was of such common use that it was a localism. During those days I played at Luna's Mexican restaurant on Geary Street with Miguel Luna and Harry Warren. They played nights at a house on Stockton Street and I heard the word jazz repeatedly."
Another musician, Clay Smith, said in 1924: "Thirty-five years ago [ca 1890] I played the trombone . . . I made tours of the big mining centres when the west was really wild . . . I was piloted to dance resorts - honky tonks. The vulgar word jazz was in general currency in those dance halls 30 years or more ago."
ACCORDING TO CASSIDY, "Jazz was so full of jasm and gism ('teas ioma' - an abundance of heat and passion; figuratively semen) that no one could, or would, write it down. In 1913, it was a word you learned by ear - like jazz music."
"In James T Farrell's novel, Gas House McGinty, written during the Jazz Age and set in Chicago in 1914, the word 'jazz' has absolutely nothing to do with hot music. It is the jazz of sex," says Cassidy.
One hundred years later, there are 80,000 Irish speakers in the US. At the college where he teaches, Cassidy has students from all ethnic groups, all of them claiming enough Irish blood to make them want to know the language.
"To understand the Irish language is to understand hybridity," says Cassidy. "If you know Irish, you've got the jazz. Irish is the hippest language on the planet."
How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads, by Daniel Cassidy, is published by Counterpunch and AK Press