Gullibility in high places
Suppose you hold some crank theory for which there is no evidence but
which is likely to appeal to some specific audience. Suppose, for
instance, that you believe that Jesus and all of his apostles were gay,
an idea that might appeal to some gay people (not me, but tastes and
opinions differ). You then write a book of stories detailing the
hot hot man-man sexual exploits of these men, keying each story to a
biblical passage. You manage to get it published. Does the
New York Times then write an
enthusiastic feature story about you and your work? Do you win an
American
Book Award -- "the purpose of the awards is to acknowledge the
excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing" -- for
non-fiction?
It sounds unlikely, doesn't it? But Daniel Cassidy has managed
something similar with his book
How
the Irish Invented Slang (CounterPunch/AK Press, 2007), which
maintains that great chunks of English slang came from Irish (an idea
that is likely to appeal to some English-speaking people of Irish
descent), supplying for each slang expression a (putative) Irish
expression that resembles it in pronunciation or spelling. And
now the
NYT has (gullibly)
celebrated
Cassidy and his preposterous book, and the book has (alas) gotten a
2007 American
Book Award for non-fiction.
Of course, there
ARE some Irish loan words in English
--
galore, for instance (see
the
OED) -- and Cassidy
catches many of these (though even there he doesn't cite his
sources). But the problem with the book is that there is no
scholarship or real evidence at all in it. As Grant Barrett says
at the beginning of his
blog
entry on the book:
It is quite incredible that Corey
Kilgannon would write in the New
York Times about Daniel Cassidy's book How the Irish Invented Slang
without talking to historical lexicographers, historical linguists, or
experts in Irish Gaelic linguistics.
They would tell him that Cassidy's theories are insubstantial, his
evidence inconclusive, his conclusions unlikely, his Gaelic atrocious
and even factitious, and his scholarship little better than
speculation. In short, his book is preposterous.
Cassidy paints himself as the maligned scholar, the unappreciated
genius, the outsider. He may be all of those things, but he is them by
choice: his work cannot withstand scholarly scrutiny so he simply
cannot afford to join forces with any larger body of experts who do
this sort of thing for a living. His book falls apart on first reading
by anyone with some expertise in the field.
Read Barrett's blog for details. For your immediate
entertainment, here's a piece from the
announcement of
a reading and performance by Cassidy on the 6th at the Irish Arts
Center in New York City:
In a fast-paced spiel (speal, cutting, sharp speech) of
monologues, stories, and songs, Daniel Cassidy slices through the
current Anglo-academic baloney
(beal onna, foolish blather)
which claims that the Irish have had no influence on the American
language.
On the gullibility front: the event was sponsored by the Irish Arts
Center in association with the Irish American Cultural Institute, NYU's
Glucksman Ireland House, and CUNY's Institute for Irish-American
Studies, and Pete Hammill and Peter Quinn were there as special
guests. You might want to check out the "critical acclaim" in the
announcement, which includes this gem:
"Save the Irish dúid from the Oxford
English dictionary! Daniel Cassidy has shaken the study of
linguistics in the U.S. with a startlingly new theory -- that much of
American slang has been borrowed from Irish... Cassidy's ideas have
rapidly gained academic respectability since the publication of his
book early this summer. This book is
truly amazing!" (Eamonn McCann,
Belfast Telegraph)
By the way, dúid is Cassidy's source for
English dude.
[Added 11/11/07: Mark Liberman
took on Cassidy on the word
bunkum last year -- and made the connection to the father in
My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who declares that English words (most remarkably,
kimono) all come from Greek.]
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 9, 2007 01:47 PM