Remembering Danny Cassidy

Daniel Cassidy, author of "How the Irish Invented Slang" Photo: Cassidy Family 

I was saddened to hear that after waging a fierce battle with pancreatic cancer, co-founder of New College Irish Studies, Daniel Cassidy, and author of “How the Irish Invented Slang,” is gone from us.

Brooklyn-born Cassidy was a man of many hats, he was both a tough street-wise dude, and a raging intellectual. He was a professor, a poet, a talented jazz reed musician, singer, composer, newshound, union organizer, merchant marine, scriptwriter, and author.

Daniel Cassidy founded, and co-directed the Irish Studies program at New College of California in 1995. He also was director of the college's Media and Film Studies program, teaching courses in storytelling, the American newspaper and broadcast history. I sat in on a few of his entertaining lectures and events.

Danny (he was always "Danny" to his friends, never Daniel—and he'd correct you too if you lapsed into the formal) developed his screenwriting chops while working for television producer David Susskind, actor Danny Glover, and director, Francis Ford Coppola. Danny's 1996 documentary "Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs" about the atrocities in Northern Ireland, was nominated for an Emmy. His other film, "Uncensored Voices," was broadcast on PBS in Canada Europe, and Japan.

Danny didn't forget his larger Irish-American community either—he was a co-founder of San Francisco's annual Crossroads Irish-American Festival, that showcases Irish and Irish-American playwrights, artists and authors every March.

Danny's controversial book of essays, "How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads" was a surprise sleeper hit that won the 2007 Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for nonfiction.

“The whole project started with a hunch — hunch, from the Irish word ‘aithint,’ meaning recognition or perception,” said Cassidy in a New York Times interview.

Danny took some heat for his intuitive poetic, and phonetic approach to the etymological roots of Irish words in English (see links below). And he may have done more harm, than good, but he certainly opened up dialogue.

Some pedagogues groused that Danny was an amateur etymologist, and ever-so-eloquently stated that his linguistic claims were "a big heaping load of hooey"; that maybe the award should have been given for fiction instead. I'm sure that was the response Danny was expecting from that crowd. He was a great one to challenge the halls of academe.

But Danny never got a chance to refute his claims and prove some of his slang hunches, for a year after his book was published, he was dead. But he had a good track record for those 65 years on this earth.

I didn't always agree with Danny's interpretations of Irish and the development of street slang, as he sometimes played it a little too fast and loose with linguistics.

Danny didn't speak Irish and didn't know the grammatical rules of Irish, an ancient highly inflected Indo-European language. His family arrived during the Irish Potato Famine, and, like many Irish immigrants, their knowledge of the Irish was lost—save for those ubiquitous slang words, in places like Hell's Kitchen. I can hear Danny saying: Don't call it the famine. There was no famine in Ireland. It was The Great Hunger. An Gorta Mór. There was plenty of food in Ireland.

I rarely saw Danny without his well-thumbed Irish pocket dictionary in hand. (I had a Spanish one just like it—my mother's, when she was honeymooning in Acapulco). He was always hunting down possible slang equivalencies.

When Danny pronounced Irish words in tough Brooklynese, sometimes it was hard to get back to the word in question. But as co-director of Irish Studies at New College, he knew who to ask for help with spelling and pronunciation of Irish. 

I admired Danny's evangelical approach to this slang work and I think some of his connections have credence—as my grandmother, a self-taught Irish scholar, was forever translating English words into Irish. Sometimes she was in left field, sometimes she was in the ballpark. Same with Danny's work.

What I didn't know at the time was that Irish, one of the oldest, and therefore, highly inflected, Indo-European languages, shared many word origins with Sanskrit via Proto-Indo-European, for example. The continuum, and all that.

I was also glad Danny finally proved H.L. Mencken wrong that the Irish contributed so little to the English language. American writer and linguist, H.L. Mencken once observed that the Irish contributed few words to American English. "Perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list." He forgot hoolighan, and lynch.

I wanted to throw back to Mencken a variation of one of his own quotes: There is a solution to every definition—neat, plausible, and wrong.

In an interview, Danny said: "The English language does not often absorb other languages, especially the Celtic languages. Irish has the longest association with English of any language on the planet, yet in England all we've got are a handful of words such as whiskey."

Note the spelling, with an "e" from uisce, or huisce. That's because the Irish monks invented it long before the Scots took up the habit.

For example, Danny said the word buckaroo came from the Irish bocaí rua, "wild playboys" or "bloody bucks." But bó is cow, buachaill is a cowherder (or cowboy, if you will), and ruadh, is, well, red (or red-haired)—so the meaning is close enough. Even if he came at it all wrong.

When Danny began to point out words "of uncertain origin" is often code for Irish, it struck a chord with me. I knew there were many more Irish words buried within the English language, despite what the Oxford English Dictionary claimed—aside from the usual suspects: smithereens, hoolighan (a surname), and shanty. 

There's also shebeen, shebang, shindig, Sheila, slew, slogan, lollapalooza, colleen, clan, keen, kabosh, banshee, brogue, brogan, bar, ben, glamour, gombeen, leprechaun, whiskey, etc., to name a few.

And it is certainly clear to the Irish speaker, both the Oxford English Dictionary (consider the source) and its American cousin, the Webster's, were rabidly anti-Irish biased ca. the inception of the OED in 1857-84, and there was a general ascribing of Gaelic words as Scottish in origin, or "of uncertain origin" rather than giving the Irish their linguistic due (this was post-famine Ireland). Where did the British think Scots Gaelic came from? Donegal Irish in another lexicon.

The gobshytes and amadáns who compiled dictionaries didn't know that slogan, gob, moniker, and Boycott were also Irish words. Danny claimed glom as Irish, as well. To glom onto something, wasn't even in the dictionary. Danny took it on with panache. And then some.

Danny was from the two Irishmen-three opinions school of conversation—unbridled wild horses of thought running rampant through the halls of academe. It was always a joy ride to have a conversation with the man, himself—even if you didn't agree. Especially if you didn't agree. There was always a hug at the end of it all. 

Danny tried on several occasions to get me to join his program at New College, but it came down to tuition, I just couldn't afford New College. He kept insisting I could make it so, but I didn't have that much faith in raising the tuition and going to school at the same time.

As it was, in 1999, I was straddling San Francisco State and UC Berkeley campuses at the same time, I was carrying 21 units a semester. And that wasn't even counting the Old Irish class with Dr. Gary Holland I was auditing. That's where I unraveled slogan from Old Irish—sluaghan, an army, multitudes.

Danny Cassidy's tenacity and wit will be missed—and though I never went to New College, it was Danny who initially got me back into school, at San Francisco State, while also attending Celtic Studies classes at UC Berkeley. His passion and enthusiasm kept me in the game when I thought I couldn't hack it during bouts of translating manuscripts from Old Irish. Stay the distance, he said.

But we kept in touch. And at the 2006 Crossroads Irish American Festival, Danny remembered me, and invited me to read with Jack Foley and Chad Sweeney at Bird & Beckett Books. It was a grand night. Ah, but the craic was good.

This blogeen is in honor to the man himself, not the (de)merits of his book. Material for another bloggybit. The world is a better place for having Danny riding crazily at the helm, for a while. I'll stop my blatherin' now.

Crossroads Irish-American Festival Poetry reading Maureen Hurley, Jack Foley, Chad Sweeney, Katherine Hastings 3/5/2006

Crossroads Irish-American Festival Poetry reading, 3/5/2006
Maureen Hurley, Jack Foley, Chad Sweeney, Katherine Hastings

2006 CROSSROADS: Irish-American Festival

EARTH DAY (rivers)

I've never written about how
when you're pressed for time,
all your favorite clothes are in a heap
on the bottom on the bathroom floor.
And you've got unexpectedly guests at the door
and there is no back exit, and you're naked.
And you've run out of allergy pills,
your eyes are twin fountains of grief,
and youth is but a drink from the past.
And how all those old people on beaches
in Florida glowing like angry poppies,
are called snowbirds, and for some reason,
the weather is nuts. it's raining again.

I've never written about
how all words are related to each other
as if on a string, and they pull at you,
demanding equal time, and you're left speechless
because in the beginning was logos.

Logic has little to do with the word.
How come logic and art are separated at the hip
by two halves of the bicameral brain,
and that imperfect tunnel channeling them.
Sometimes the traffic jam leaves my words
stranded on the shore, pressing against your eyes
waiting for your lips to liberate them from
the secret reservoir of the blank page.

I've yet to write about way
the horizon line always has one vanishing point,
where all straight lines seem to meet up
on another dimensional plane.
As if getting in the last word in an argument.
I've yet to unlock the secret
of the Indian in the cupboard.
How we say the word cupboard,
the word cup is lost
in the broken crockery of the past.

What about coincidences,
like how a wild fire broke out
on the 10-year anniversary of Chernobyl,
releasing radioactive isotopes back into the air,
the Ukrainian still using the reactor
even though Ground Zero spread 15 miles
in every direction. The children of Belaerus,
in cancer wards, like wise and old men
heated out of their childhood by an angry light
burning graphite fire that raged for weeks,
making me realize the earth is a fragile flower
perhaps plucked too soon, one April
nearly 10 years ago, today,
and unseasonable rain falling,
I marveled how the unstoppable isotopes
knew no boundaries, save lead,
we could hold pencils over our heads,
but there's no longer lead in them,
and the covered porch at the school,
was a useless umbrella.

How that day lead me to the Ukraine
where I found myself eyeing dinner,
as they eyed me back, two carp
in an enameled washpan mouthed small o's,
as my host mother proudly showed me the day's catch.
I had to ask her how far were we from Chernobyl,
where they came from, the Dnieper River,
that drains the watersheds of Chernobyl.
She threw those fish in the trash,
still alive and gasping for water.
My fear did little for the concept of détente.
And the Soviet police followed me everywhere.

How come I've never read about the length of rivers,
the cradle of the Indus,1800 miles,
or Saraswati's knowledge
the Yangtze, and the Yellow River's 2903 silted miles,
where secretive river dolphins hide from extinction,
the Nile 4160 miles, despite the Aswan Dam,
the Amazon 4880 miles, that drains the Andes,
the mighty Mississippi , Old Man River at 3740 miles,
I have seen it at floodstage from the air,
devouring fields and cities with a relentless hunger,
and I've crossed that divide at Graceland.

And closer to home,
the American River, all 300 miles.
One summer I rafted down it,
And the Sacramento River, 320 miles,
how we silted it up searching for gold,
and the Russian River, 100 miles, home river,
Slavianka, Slavic maiden, or Snake River in Pomo,
most of its length I've hiked, swam or canoed.
All those rivers taking us to the sea,
thalatta, our mother, the sea.


With input from Jake Berry and Jack Foley
Earth Day, 22 April, 1996

At Paul Mariah's memorial reading

At Paul Mariah's memorial reading, Jack and Adele Foley, Gene Ruggles, Mike Tuggle, Susan Kennedy, Noni Howard, Vernon Edgar, Herman Berlant, Jim Byrd, Michelle Bertrand, Earl LeClair, Leland Stoneys, Clive Matson, and Glenn Ingersoll. After the reading, we learned that Paul's archives will be sent to the University of Texas in Austin. Bob Berner's poetry workshops led to Minotaur, and ManRoot press. We head on over to Michelle's place with Mary Norbert Körte, Jim Byrd, Herman Berlandt, Vernon Edgar, and Eugene Ruggles—it's a small sendoff party. I was tired and depressed, was home by 9 PM, and asleep by 10:30 PM. I slept nearly 12 hours—like the dead, is it a residual flu, yet another confrontation with death, or the energy of too much people?

2/11 1996


Undated fragment:
Noni Howard said that I had a poem in The Parnassus of World Poets, which one? The day she told me that Paul Mariah died.