When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher, in an attempt to explain to the class a pun on the word "knowledge" in a poem we were studying, told us that a certain verb too obscene to print outright in this article was originally an acronym for "for unlawful carnal knowledge." This must have been one tidbit in his "fun facts" arsenal, the kind we all keep in our mental back pockets for impressing others with our scraps of erudition.
The problem, as anyone with access to a dictionary, snopes.com or a healthy allotment of common sense knows, is that this "fun fact" is completely preposterous. The obscenity is attested in 1503, long before English spelling was standardized; the whole concept of an acronym would have been foreign to a 16th-century English speaker.
This complete lack of linguistic awareness is, unfortunately, not an isolated example of incompetent secondary education. We live in a culture in which E.B. White and William Strunk's "Elements of Style" -- a book that contains such meaningless advice as "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" and elevates the authors' arbitrary preferences, such as avoiding sentence-initial "however" to unquestionable truths -- is treated as a holy text of grammatical advice. Across America, people are not just ignorant of linguistic facts; they are often actively hostile to them.
These hard truths about the extent of the general cluelessness laypeople have regarding language-related matters is necessary to explain the adulatory press coverage of Daniel Cassidy's supposedly nonfiction work "How the Irish Invented Slang." Cassidy's thesis is that many common English words and phrases, especially those that comprise our slang lexicon, have Irish etymologies that have been ignored or even suppressed by the Anglo-American lexicographers that staff the OED and other major dictionaries.
In the book's first chapter, Cassidy explains that he got the idea for the book when he was reading an Irish-to-English dictionary and noticed that some of the Irish words were phonetically similar to their English translations. This seems to be the method of research Cassidy preferred when writing "How the Irish Invented Slang," as the bulk of text is simply a list of English terms collated with phonetically and semantically similar Irish words. Absent is any real attempt to explain how one was derived from the other.
Nor does he ever refute the etymologies he attempts to replace. The etymologies included in major dictionaries are rigorously researched by experts with real linguistic credentials and degrees, but Cassidy appears content with casting the explanations aside without any effort at due process.
If there were any philological justice in the world, "How the Irish Invented Slang" would be ridiculed as the poorly researched showcase of incompetence it is. Instead, it has received the American Book Award, and its author was sycophantically profiled by The New York Times.
This reaction is not particularly surprising. In a society in which reality-based grammar instruction is eschewed and the linguistic superstitions of Strunk & White -- not to much mention just about every English teacher you've encountered -- are treated as gospel, ordinary people are rendered gullible to the nonsense put forth by writers like Daniel Cassidy. The critical and popular response is therefore not only expected but rather depressing because it shows us just how vulnerable we are to this kind of baloney. "Baloney," of course, is derived from the Irish "Béal ónna" (silly loquacity, foolish talk). 3
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