Tracing Slang to Ireland

Here's great blogworthy Corey Kilgannon story from the New York Times, submitted be the good brother Chris Cahillane.

Click the following link: Humdinger of a Project: Tracing Slag to Ireland. It features Daniel Cassidy, author of “How the Irish Invented Slang,” at O’Lunney’s near Times Square.

Per Amazon, Cassidy's 5-star rated tome is described as follows, "In a series of lively essays, this pioneering book proves that US slang has its strongest wellsprings in nineteenth-century Irish America. "Jazz" and "poker," "sucker" and "scam" all derive from Irish. While demonstrating this, Daniel Cassidy simultaneously traces the hidden history of how Ireland fashioned America, not just linguistically, but through the Irish gambling underworld, urban street gangs, and the powerful political machines that grew out of them. Cassidy uncovers a secret national heritage, long discounted by our WASP-dominated culture."

Daniel Cassidy is founder and co-director of An Lann ireannach, the Irish Studies Program at New College of California in San Francisco. His research on the Irish language's influence on American vernacular and slang has been published in the New York Observer, Ireland's Hot Press magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and L, the Irish-language newspaper.

Thanks Chris!