Belfast slang

Sceala Philosopher Location: NYC

Irish, and all that jazz
By Eamonn McCann
Belfast telgraph
Save the Irish dude (dúid) from the Oxford English Dictionary! That's the demand of Professor Dan Cassidy who hits Derry and Belfast next week to fling down the gauntlet to all conventional dictionaries and introduce his new book, The Secret Language of the Crossroads: How the Irish Invented Slang.
If you think that you've had it up to here with chit-chat about Irish America, think again. You haven't heard the likes of this. Or more likely you have, but didn't know, because nobody ever pointed it out - that jazz comes from Donegal, for example.

Everywhere an outline of Cassidy's thesis is presented, the first reaction is that it's bunkum (buanchumadh, a baseless yarn or story). Then, as he cites example after example of Irish words infiltrating the street vernacular of the US, the plausibility of his argument tends to overwhelm scepticism.
Says Prof Joseph Lee, of University College, Cork: "This is a landmark book, at once learned and lively, and quite enthralling as to how American English acquired so vibrant a popular vocabulary."

The book would never have happened had Boliver not proven to be Cassidy's Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was an ancient tablet unearthed near the town of Rosetta by Napoleon's army as it swept into Egypt in 1799. It was inscribed with a tribute to the Pharaoh, in demotic script, as well as in Greek and hieroglyphs. Through study of the markings, it eventually proved possible for Jean-Francois Champollion, an expert in both linguistics and Egyptology, to decipher the meaning of a once-impenetrable language, giving all subsequent historians new insight into the past.

Cassidy, of Belfast/Donegal extraction, who grew up in the New York Catholic-Irish ambience of the Five Points, recalls vague boyhood puzzlement at the family nick-name for his grandfather - Boliver. It seemed to refer to the old man's taciturn nature, to the fact that it was ever a struggle to get a word out of him.
But, Boliver? Then one day a few years back, as he learned Irish - he only took to it in the past decade, to facilitate his day-job as co-director of the Irish Studies Programme at New College, San Francisco - Boliver popped unbidden back into his mind as he pondered a word on a page. It probably helped that he was a student of the language at the time, had to contemplate each word as he deployed it, in a way that a native or fluent speaker wouldn't need to.

Bailbhe, a mute or inarticulate person ...
Thus, a buried Irish word, obtruding from the place in his memory where it had lain hidden for years, suddenly suggested the possibility of an area of cultural history, hitherto unexplored, which might offer new insights.

What he had stumbled on was: "The slang and accents of five generations and 100 years in the tenements, working-class neighbourhoods and old breac-Ghaeltachta (Irish-English speaking areas) slums (s lom, a bleak place) of Brooklyn and New York City, which held the hard-edged spiel (speal, cutting language) and vivid cant (caint, speech) of a hundred."

The Irish had poured into America in the years following the Famine, into the tumult of the world's most rapidly industrialising cities, at the very moment when technological advance was transforming communications at bewildering speed. Large Irish communities, as many as 35% primary Irish speakers, became established in just a couple of decades in New Orleans, New York, Boston, and then everywhere.

Because the Irish were kept out from respectable society (or kept to themselves), their contribution to the language tended to be ignored by formal linguistics. The standard American dictionary, Webster's, cites the source of very many of the words which Cassidy traces to Irish as 'unknown'. The Oxford English Dictionary for the most part follows suit, or, as Cassidy insists, systematically reassigns Irish-derived words to fanciful origins.

The history of 'jazz' illustrates the thesis. While Webster's and the OED profess themselves puzzled by its provenance, Cassidy was able to trace it to its root through doggedness, instinct and inspiration. He has certainly identified its first-ever appearance in print, in a baseball report in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1913 by a celebrated Irish-American journalist of the era, Scoop Gleeson. Reporting on March 8 from the SF Seals' training camp at Boyes Hot Springs, Gleeson wrote: "There's jazz in the morning dew, jazz in the daily bath, and jazz in the natural spring water."

Gleeson defined his new word as, "the pepper". It is clear from the passages of the Chronicle quoted by Cassidy that it conveyed heat, excitement, enthusiasm.

Four years after its debut, in 1917, it was first used to describe a form of music, in the name of the Chicago-based Dixieland Jass Band. It comes, says Cassidy, from the Donegal Irish word teas, heat, which, with the soft, fricative 't' of the county, sounds like ... 'jazz'. There's much, much more along the same fascinating lines in Cassidy's stunningly original book.
Come along with your cronies (comh-rghna, mutual pals) and hear him at Sandino's in Derry next Wednesday night, or on Thursday at the Rock Bar in west Belfast.
You dig (tuig, understand)?
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