Watch Your Language

“A free lunch in saloons is history. But free lunch in school for poor kids should be mandatory. There should be free food for anyone who is hungry. If that’s socialism, I’m a socialist. We give free meals to mass murderers. Why not for the poor? Why do you have to commit a crime to be fed? Perhaps that’s why one out of every one hundred Americans is in prison.”

Thus Danny Cassidy, whose book, How The Irish Invented Slang, gusted into the musty world of etymology like a blast of ozone into smog.
When I wrote here two years ago of Danny’s insistence that “jazz” derived from the Donegal-Irish “teas” (heat), the dominant reaction was derision.
But no-one has since been able to challenge Cassidy’s prodigious research, tracing the term back to post-Famine Donegal, then to “jass”, first used by an Irish-American sports writer of a “hot” pitch in baseball in 1913, and then in evolution to define a form of “Dixieland” music.
In the past year, the New York Times has carried a feature-page filled with testimonials to the solidity of Danny’s research. Academics and writers have accepted the validity of his thesis – that Irish is the source of much American slang.
Hundreds of thousands of native Irish speakers were among the millions who flooded into America after the Famine to settle amid the tumult of burgeoning cities. Poor and mostly illiterate in English, the words and phrases they’d brought with them infiltrated the speech of the streets rather than the prose of the publishing houses. Meanwhile, many used Irish to speak secrets within earshot of authority.
How The Irish Invented Slang includes a 120-page Irish/American vernacular dictionary, plus a series of provocative essays written in muscular style on the hidden ways the Irish lower orders helped shape the way America speaks. The opening paragraph above, from Danny’s account of his dig into the origins of “lunch”, provides a good example of his discursive methodology.
The Oxford English Dictionary reckons that lunch “perhaps evolved from lump, on the analogy of the apparent relation between hump and hunch, bump and bunch.” Scholarly, eh? Danny’s truer story comes with a tour of 19th century Irish bar-rooms in New York and San Francisco: “Lunch is the plural Irish noun lóinte (pron. lónche) meaning ‘food, victuals, rations, ‘grub’ – from ‘Middle Irish lón, Old Irish lóon; (it is) cognate with Old Breton lon.” (Mac Bain’s Gaelic Etymological Dictionary; Dineen, 675; Ó Dónaill, 800.)
Sounds definitive to me.
If you still think the thesis fanciful, consider: “Like he teached me couple words he say the folks be speakin in Ireland. Cause they got they-own language over there I guess. Like ‘open the door’ and ‘fetch in the supper’. Domestic things you know. Well I forgetted em all now... Got in mind that ever last soul be spyin on him you know. So he want me to go speakin some way they caint catch. But it was real hard... Was real, real hard.... That ain’t no language gwine to catch someplace else...
“‘Be duh husht’ I remember. Now I come to remember. ‘Quiet your mouth’ that mean... In Ireland... Cause the reason I remember, I often wanted to say it... House like that, you would”.
That’s runaway slave Elizabeth Longstreet, speaking of James Con O’Keeffe, commander of a Union brigade of Irish immigrants in the American Civil War, in Joe O’Connor’s Redemption Falls.
Be duh husht there, dictionary dudes (duid) Cassidy has shown there’s such a thing as a freed lunch.

Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela of Madrid has been the scourge of every half-decent measure brought in over the past couple of years by Spain’s centre-left government. Education reform, divorce law, stem-cell research, gay civil partnerships – Rouco has damned them all as paving stones on the road to hell.
Now the appearance of Magdalena Hernandez topless in a suspender belt on the cover of top-selling soft-porn magazine Interviu has caused ructions for Rouco. Magdalena, his niece, says she stripped off to give him grief.
“He preaches all the time about the family and family values. But he doesn’t respect the family. He abandons his own. When my father died, he didn’t come to the funeral, didn’t send flowers, didn’t tell my mother of his sorrow.”
Magdalena says her uncle claimed he couldn’t make the funeral because it clashed with a meeting he’d arranged with the Pope. But, she discovered, there was no such meeting.
“I wanted to bare his hypocrisy naked,” says much-miffed Magdalena.
Her retaliatory breast-baring prompted Spanish journalists to probe deeper into Rouco’s affairs. They discovered he has a sizeable investment in Pfizers, makers of Viagra and the injectable contraceptive Dep-Provera.
I trust that it’s not just wishful thinking has led The Freethinker (“The Voice of Atheism since 1881”) to report this month that Rouco has fallen victim to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and seen the value of his portfolio plummet by 20 percent this year.
But not all bishops are bad. Take retired Australian prelate, Dr. Geoffrey Robinson, whose book, Confronting Power And Sex In The Catholic Church, has drawn praise from unlikely sources. Like me.
One chapter was headed: “How many abused children is celibacy worth?”
Dr. Robinson has now been disowned by fellow bishops, 38 of whom have issued a statement praising his life-time contribution to the Church, but saying that no-one should pay him heed, on account of his “questioning of the authority of the Catholic Church.”
There you are. Balance. A sound man and a bishop to boot.