Irish slang

Long a puzzle to linguists is why the Irish, despite Ireland's proximity to England and the large number of Irish immigrants to the United States, have had so little influence on the English language. English has loads of French words, Spanish words, Latin words, Greek words, Arab words, Indian words and even American Indian words. So why so few Irish words other than the likes of shamrock and blarney?

David Cassidy, founder of the Irish Studies Program at New College in California, wondered the same thing until someone gave him an Irish dictionary. At first he wanted to just throw it away, but then he decided to cover a few words each night before going to sleep. The result of this unusual bedtime reading is How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads.

What he discovered was that numerous English words, mostly slang or originally slang, were introduced by the Irish, but so subtly that nobody seemed to notice. His 303-page book includes a dictionary of Irish-American vernacular more than 200 pages long. That's a lot of words, and includes such words and phases as drag race, jazz, poker, humdinger, hokum, lunch, so long, nincumpoop. scallawag and scam.

So how is it possible that so many trained linguists could have missed the Irish connection to so many words? Cassidy doesn't have much to say on this topic, but I have a few ideas:

1. Although linguists tend to learn a variety of different languages, Irish (or Gaelic) is not necessarily one of them. The number of people who speak it continues to shrink, so why bother?

2. If respected experts have previously concluded that the Irish language had little influence on English, later scholars may have been disinclined to challenge them on that question.

3. Irish words, as is true of many languages, don't look the way they are pronounced, at least not to English speakers. Ailteoir seaoilte, for example, doesn't look much like helter skelter, yet the pronunciation is similar, as are the meanings.

4. Most of these English slang terms were probably coined by second generation immigrants who learned Irish in their homes and English at school and on the streets. They took Irish words but gave them English pronunciations, often substituting existing English words that sounded like the Irish words.  Thus the Irish word anacal, meaning mercy or surrender, came to be uncle, as in "say uncle," when one boy gives up to a tougher boy.

"The Irish had invented slang by remembering the Irish language without knowing it," Cassidy writes.

In Robert L. Chapman's 1987 reference book American Slang, he traces the word guzzle to the French word gosier, meaning throat. Cassidy, on the other hand, says guzzle sprang from the Irish word gus oil, meaning "high-spirited, vigorous drinking." My vote goes to Cassidy.