The legacy of Danny Cassidy

'A Fervent Melody Struggling to Be Heard'

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Daniel Cassidy

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The more he pondered, the clearer he heard what had gone unheard for a very long time. “Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay” wasn’t rhythmic filler. It was the soul of the song: the English phonetic spelling of the Irish phrase “filleadh mé uair éirithe (pron. fill’ah mæ úr í-ríh), meaning “time to get up, I go back.” 

In Cassidy’s words: “I saw with amazement that ‘Paddy Works the Railway,’ with its rousing tune and 6/8 jig time, wasn’t just another widely known American folk song. It was also a sanas-laoi (pron. sanas læ, a secret song) of the crossroads, a key to understanding how this ancient language—the oldest written language in Europe next to Latin and Greek, the beating heart of Irish culture for over a millennium—made a place for itself in a brave and often brutal New World. Slang, that most pliable and subversive of linguistic tools, the language of laborers, itinerants, touts, chorus girls, barmen—the country’s working stiffs—became the instrument of its survival.”

(Note: in How the Irish Invented Slang, Cassidy posits that our word stiff, meaning common working man or woman, a “regular Joe” or “Jane,” a migratory worker, a hobo and also a dead person, is derived from the Irish word staf, staif, pl. n., a burly person, a strong, husky, muscular person, a broad-shouldered person, a “big lug.” Also, staf an bais (pron. staf n bash), the stiffness caused by death, fig. “a stiff.”

Hettie O’Hara, a native Irish speaker and a woman of penetrating intelligence who teaches Irish at the University of California at Berkeley, once told me that when Cassidy first came to her with his radical insight into “Paddy Works the Railway,” she found it hard to credit. How could something so obvious, she wondered, have been so obscured? “It was as if it stayed hidden in plain sight because we were conditioned not to see it,” she said. Ms. O’Hara became an invaluable resource to Cassidy in the compilation of How the Irish Invented Slang.

Others have been far less receptive. Though no American university or college offers a degree in etymology and few American etymologists have even a slight understanding of Irish, a cadre of soi-disant professional etymologists has done its best to deride, dismiss and, whenever possible, ignore Cassidy’s work. In the year since his death, relieved of his insistent challenge to their blank refusal to consider the evidence of the influence of Irish on American slang, the “dictionary dudes” (that was Cassidy’s term for them) have happily returned to their policy of benign neglect. I have no doubt that their fervent hope is that his thesis will wither from inattention and quietly blow away.

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