Jacob Silberberg for The New York Times
Daniel Cassidy, author of “How the Irish Invented Slang,” at O’Lunney’s near Times Square.
Posted on 11/10/2007 10:28:43 PM PST by neverdem
Growing up Irish in Queens and on Long Island, Daniel Cassidy was nicknamed Glom.
“I used to ask my mother, ‘Why Glom?’ and she’d say, ‘Because you’re always grabbing, always taking things,’” he said, imitating his mother’s accent and limited patience, shaped by a lifetime in Irish neighborhoods in New York City.
It was not exactly an etymological explanation, and Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.”
“Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch. He found the word “balbhán,” meaning a silent person, and he surmised that it was why his quiet grandfather was called the similarly pronounced Boliver.
He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word “gimmick” seemed to come from “camag,” meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.
Could “scam” have derived from the expression “’S cam é,” meaning a trick or a deception? Similarly, “slum” seemed similar to an expression meaning “It is poverty.” “Dork” resembled “dorc,” which Mr. Cassidy’s dictionary called “a small lumpish person.” As for “twerp,” the Irish word for dwarf is “duirb.”
Mr. Cassidy, 63, began compiling a lexicon of hundreds of Irish-inspired slang words and recently published them in a book called “How the Irish Invented Slang,” which last month won the 2007 American Book Award for nonfiction, and which he is in New York this week promoting.
“The whole project started with a hunch — hunch, from the Irish word ‘aithint,’ meaning recognition or perception,” the verbose Mr. Cassidy said in...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ireland ping :)
Check out the pic in #1... O’Lunney’s!
That's ferkakte.
Substitute Ireland ping! Irish_Thatcherite talks real funny :-).
Also the origin of dweeb?
That didn't stop a Boston Irish American from making the film Boondock Saints.
Very interesting. We probably have other loanwords from Tagalog, and we just don’t realize the source.
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