C, D and E
Over the last few months, I have been working on a Cassidese Glossary, taking the words in the dictionary section of Cassidy's book one by one, with less of the invective I have heaped on Cassidy and his cronies in the past.
A few weeks ago, I completed the As and Bs and then wrote an analysis of the lessons arising from my examination of Cassidy's claims for words beginning with those two letters, in which I returned to the invective and once again pointed out how dishonest, twisted and incompetent Daniel Cassidy was. I have now completed the Cs, Ds and Es and I will write a short post of the same kind to analyse what I have found in this part of the glossary.
The sections for these three letters contain 72 entries (counting words like Croak, Croaked and Croaker as separate entries, as they were given by Cassidy). As with the 75 entries for the As and Bs, a handful of these are genuine Irish (words like cross and dornick). A number of others are probably not genuine Irish, but the claim for an Irish origin predates Cassidy, for example, dig for understand or cock-eyed coming from caoch.
As with the As and Bs, the vast majority of the words dealt with here are complete nonsense. There is no chance of them being correct. Most of the candidate phrases were invented by Cassidy, and even when they are to be found in Irish dictionaries, the entries given in those dictionaries are not given accurately, but rewritten by Cassidy to make them closer to whatever term he was trying to promote. Most of them, like de áit as the origin of ditch or ciúta as the origin of cute or coillteoireacht as the origin of cold turkey are so puerile and silly that there is little point in trying to take them seriously. Unlike the As and Bs, where there were several that were not entirely ridiculous (like big bug from boc mór) with the Cs, Ds and Es, there are no entries that are even slightly interesting and worthy of further examination.
The amount covered so far probably constitutes a quarter of the material in Cassidy's glossary, as several letters either contain no entries, like Z and X, or very few, like N and Y. If the pattern found with the letters dealt with so far is repeated with the rest of the letters, it is unlikely that there will even be one new credible word of Irish origin out of the hundreds given by Cassidy in his book.
In other words, far from being a scholar or a political radical or a supporter of the Irish language, Cassidy was an arrogant, narcissistic flake who was constitutionally incapable of telling the truth. For twelve years, this worthless creep drew a university salary as a professor, in spite of the fact that he flunked his degree and had no qualifications. Cassidy has been dead for years. He is now beyond shame, though he is still not beyond disgrace. Scum like Peter Quinn, Terence Winch, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Joe Lee, Peter Linebaugh, Eamonn McCann, Corinne Marrinan, the board of the San Francisco Irish Crossroads Festival and the rest of the dim-witted pseudo-intellectual cronies of Daniel Cassidy are still with us.
They disgust me, not because of their stupidity in letting themselves be deceived by this con-artist in the first place, but because of their unwillingness to admit they were conned and apologise. These are people who are so up themselves that they won't admit to making a mistake, even if that means that ordinary, decent people continue to be conned by the flagrant rubbish they recommended. They deserve to be mocked and treated with utter contempt by all right-thinking people.
This entry was posted in The Cassidy Scandal and tagged Corinne Marrinan, cultural appropriation, Dan Cassidy, Daniel Cassidy, fake linguistics, false etymology, How The Irish Invented Slang, Joe Lee, Michael Patrick MacDonald, San Francisco Irish Crossroads Festival on June 1, 2019 by Danielomastix.
← Cassidese Glossary – Eighty-Six Cassidese Glossary – Fantod →