So Cassidy rose up and threw this world in the face of the great lexicographers and etymologists. Why did Danny suddenly see what no one had seen before, that those Irish words saturate the American language? He saw, because he felt in his bones and sinews the nineteenth-century Irish emigrants’ world, of the slum, the railroad, the shipyard, the gambling hall, the carny circus tents, the gangs. Mencken who wrote in 1937, “The Irish… gave American very few new words perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list.”ĭan writes in his book that the revelation that this was baloney came when, at Claire’s urging he was reading Focloir Póca, a little pocket Irish/English dictionary left him in his will by Kevin O’Dowd.
Let us rise.” On the terrain of lexicography and etymology, the “great” were those like H.L. The other day, here on this site, I quoted one of Dan’s heroes, James Connolly, saying “the great appear great to us only because we are on our knees. It’s why he had the single, huge, pioneering perception that enabled him to revolutionize eymological history.
Danny had the vivid, humorous, compassionate, furious realism of someone who knew well what life looks like from the other side of the tracks, terrain intimately familiar to the millions of the Irish diaspora. He was thin-skinned about all the right things: the assumption of privilege, the pretensions of the toffs, the bottomless wellsprings of English and Yankee arrogance that looks down its nose and misses everything that matters. His manic energy would boil up and over, like the hound rushing into the thorns. His bright blue eyes would shine as we’d argue sometimes. In would fly the dog and after a commotion out would streak the rabbit. A jazz guitarist, screenwriter, union organizer,, teacher, historian, man of words, Irish Republican, he sometimes reminded one of those bustling, fiery dogs the lads would take to the rabbit warrens when I was growing up in outside Youghal in county Cork. He was highly educated and well read, but also truly street smart. I’d ask him and his wife Clare up to Petrolia once in a while, mostly just to enjoy the tremor of alarm I’d catch down the phone that his feet might have to quit pavement. Not for him the repose of nature’s temple. I look at the book here on my desk and think, Thank God he got that out of his head and on to the printed page and the world will have that part of him always.ĭan came out of Brooklyn.
We’re very proud that one big legacy Danny left behind comes in the form of How The Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads, which CounterPunch Books/AK Press published two years ago. Since 2005 he was a vivid presence in my life and in that of all of us here at CounterPunch. We knew for a few months he was facing desperate odds, but the news still comes hard. Daniel Cassidy died over this last weekend in San Francisco, taken by cancer in his early sixties.
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