DAN CASSIDY: How the Irish Invented American Slang Word origin AND Etymology of Jazz
Professor Dan Cassidy explains the etymology of the Irish word JAZZ
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2007 American Book Award Winner Dan Cassidy explains gig, juke, boogie woogie, Irish Slang and Irish American Vernacular English. Learn about Irish American Vernacular English and the hidden influence of Irish and Scots-Gaelic on what we call American English
Jazz: What is the origin of the word Jazz? The Irish word Teas is pronounced jazz, jass, chas, or t'as.
LISTEN TO CASSIDY EXPLAIN JAZZ |
Professor Dan Cassidy Founder and Co-Director Irish Studies Program, An Léann Éireannach New College of California San Francisco, CA Crossroads Conference 3/06 - ONLINE Questions to BIO Copyright 2004 |
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2007 American Book Award Winner Hear Speech ISBN: 9781904859604
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Reclaiming the knowledge back from a time long forgotten: Irish Claim The Word Jazz. READ the Book Reviews: Irish Americans especially will be delighted to know, they have been speaking Irish all along in their slang and American English, while believing and bemoaning that they had lost their native tongue many years ago. With imagination and scholarship, Cassidy has restored this hidden treasure to us in a book that is filled with revelations, wit and humor.
New York Times Review "Humdinger of a Project: Tracing Slang to Ireland" - Nov. 6 2007 |
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CITATIONS - REFERENCES - RESOURCES
THE BEGINNINGS - What's the Origin of the word Jazz? The Irish Word Teas Means Heat.
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. Professor Dan Cassidy had already published "The Sanas of Jazz as Teas" ©2002 in the poet David Meltzer's Jazz Magazine Shuffle Boil.
"Danny Cassidy knows the sanas of the pizzazz of jazz. Which is to say, the secret etymology."
LISTEN
Trace the etymology and sanas of the word JAZZ.
Ellis makes the research available to you in PDF files showing The Etymology of Jazz and many other words that originally come from Irish American Vernacular English providing citations and references.
It takes the gift of the goddess to unite Karen Ellis and the internet with the key 1982 "GIN-I-KER" citation from the 1940's scholarship of Peter Tamony described by labor leader and folklorist Archie Green as "the keeper of the lore of the Irish clans of San Francisco."; WITH Professor Dan Cassidy, and the source of the word "Jazz" back to Kildare, Ireland.
Ellis goes to Kildare and finds the jazz called St. Brigid's Fire.
The House of Fire - St. Bridgid's Teas (Jass) Heat The pagan Goddess Brigid's feast day and the Xtian St. Brigid's Day. The Day of the Gin-i-ker - Tine caor (also spelled teine caor) means " a fireball, a thunderbolt, a meteor, a raging fire, lightning. " (1) Bridget's fire (tine) is the thunderbolt (tine caor) of fifth and sixth century Irish literacy. It flashes with the sacred jazz (teas, pron. "jass," heat, enthusiasm, and passion) of knowledge. Tine caor, teine caor, caor thine, Dineen, pp.163, 1200)
IMBOLC (Feb. 1st ) is her sacred day in both the old Celtic religion and the latter-day Celtic-Christian calendar. Happy St. Brigid's Day! The day of the gin-i-ker (tine caor) and jazz (teas).
GINIKER
Irish Guys Writing with Irish Words.
Irish American Sports Reporter "Scoop" Gleason of the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913 article uses the word "JAZZ".
Ellis locates Tamony's research papers, emails the "GINIKER" citation to Cassidy who searches the San Francisco Main Library ( which happens to be located only about mile away from where Tamony lived all those years ago) and now locates the newspaper microfiche finding those original sports page articles.
Movie titled "Her Twelve Men" (1954) about 1/2 hour into the movie the Gym Teacher advises Ms. Stuart the struggling teacher played by Greer Garson to give her 12 students, all boys, an assignment that has GINIKER! In other words, a lesson that will get the boys excited - enthusiastic - and passionate. The gym teacher says "giniker". Giniker means passion, enthsiasm, energy. It is the lightening bolt that starts the fire. (movie trailer)
"GINIKER" - THE MISSING LINK that explains the new word "JAZZ" in the San Francisco Bulletin March 1913. ARTICLES AND PICTURES trace and explain what Jazz means.
These first Published Examples S.F. Bulletin, March 3, 1913 of the new word Jazz have nothing to do with music, but refer to an intangible quality possessed by baseball players; what another writer in the S.F. Bulletin, Ernest Hopkins, described in April 1923 as “life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility, ebullience, courage, happiness oh, what’s the use? Jazz. Nothing else can express it”.
The San Francisco sports reporter Scoop Gleeson claimed he heard the word Jazz from fellow Irish American newspaperman, Spike Slattery, while they were at the training camp of the local baseball team, the San Francisco Seals. Slattery said he had heard it in a crap game.
Dan Cassidy Meets Spike Slattery's Grandson in Sonoma CA at the book reading 11/07.
Irish American Vernacular English Baseball Words used by Scoop Gleeson in the Sports pages. Jazz appears in print 25 times in the month of March 1913, 24 times in Scoop's articles.
© 2006 Boyes Hot Springs is 10 miles away from this hot spring that I visited at the last mission built in Sonoma, CA. ~ KE
Where was the game?
In Boyes Springs, CA
What do you find there?
HOT WATER.
Art Hickman an unemployed local San Francisco Irish Jazz musician had also been to Boyes Springs and to the baseball training camp looking for contacts. Dan Cassidy can elaborate on this story. The Boyes' Hot Springs' water was in a state of natural 135 degree natural JAZZ (teas, pron . Jass, Heat) Using the word as a Gaelic incantation to the gambling "gods of the odds."
Essays, References, Citations, Resources, Definitions
Find out what Scoop Gleeson meant - when he said: 'Its members have trained on ragtime and `jazz'.' AND more Irish American Vernacular English words used by Scoop Gleeson in the Sports pages to talk about baseball.
- Jasm & Gism as a Source for the Word "Jazz"
From the Work of Peter Tamony - The Irish and Scots Gaelic Sanas of Fizz, Fizzle, and Sizzle and Teas.
Like a lexical star the Irish and Scots Gaelic fizz and fizzle are perpetually losing their Teas (pron. chass, jass, or jazz depending on your dialect) means heat, excitement, and high spirit. - The Big "Butter an' Eggman"
The King of Teas (Jass, Heat) - The Sacred Secret Tongue of the Saol Luim
(Slum, World of Poverty) - Boogie
Borrowing from Irish into English we used the words boogie and boogaloo to mean move fast or depart quickly with no reference to music.
Also see Boogie Woogie Music.
What Does Boogie Mean? 1941 Ball of Fire - Billy Wilder, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyk.
Slang is words that takes off his coat, spits on it's hands and gets to work! - Irish American Vernacular English gave us Gambling Slang.
Learn The Sanas (Irish Etymology) of Faro, Poker and the Secret Flash Words for the Brotherhood of American Gamblers. - and more Irish American Vernacular English Origin of Hoodoo and Juke Joint
TRACING
when words first get "BORROWED" from the vernacular into the standard.
IRISH LANGUAGE WORDS GET BORROWED
No one can dispute that the Irish word 'teas' means "heat, warmth", and the notion of borrowing from Irish into English happened every day since the Irish came to America. Language contact covered the entire United States and Caribbean. [see Boogie] Ireland, boasts family ties with 15 U.S. presidents. Four have direct ties to Northern Ireland. And there are 34.3 million people in the United States who claimed some Irish heritage in the last census.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." ~James D. Nicoll 1990
TRACING happens in many ways including songs. A word can exist for numerous years even centuries before it gets into print.
[". . .Rhymes that have been rubbed clean and hard against the bone of life, whose stories are rooted in an eternity of time."][ ". . . Jingles, riddles, silly ballads, wistful lullabies, jiggy tunes and game songs"] belong to the children of America and reflect a composite character of the common people residing in the United States. ~ Lomax
Words that were spoken and spelled by non Irish speakers, (like Lomax) who had no training in Irish as a Second Language spelled out what they thought they heard pronounced, and didn't bother to write the Irish words correctly, and couldn't pronounce the Irish words in the first place. This is how you end up with so called "nonsense syllables".
WORDS WITH GAELIC ROOTS - Some American English slang words with Mr Cassidy's version of their Irish root below:
- Buck: a strong and spirited young man
boc: a wag, a playboy - Caca: euphemism for excrement
Cac/caca - excrement, filth, probably derived from the Latin caco - Cantankerous: grumpy, awkward
Ceanndanacht arsa - old obstinacy, aged wilfulness. - Cold turkey: cut off an addiction abruptly
Coilleoireach, coillteoireachta - cutting off, expurgation - Daddy-o - affectionate term for trendy male
Daideo - grandfather - Freaky: strange or unsettling
Fraochaidhe: fierce, fuerious, passionate - Gee Whiz: exclamation
Dia Uas: Great God! - Geezer: fellow
Gaomshar, gaosach: a wise person - Hick: a rural person
Aitheach: a peasant - Racket: organised crime
Ragaireachd: violence, extortion - Razzmatazz: showing off, extravagance
Roiseadh mortas: high spirits and exultation.
“Paddy Works On The Railway
re-translated
At the hour of rising I return to work upon the railway...
Sla/n agus beannacht
** PADDY WORKS ON THE RAILWAY
aka Paddy Works On The Erie” by Anon. (ca. 1835)
sung by Daniel Cassidy 3.17.05 San Francisco
This foundational American work-song goes back to New York State in the 1830s and '40s. This is the first time Paddy Works on the Erie aka Paddy Works on the Railway's famous refrain has been re-translated back into its linguistic root in the Irish language. Prior to this it was thought the language of the chorus of Paddy Works on The Erie was made up of nothing but what was thought of as "nonsense syllables." They were not nonsense. These Irish Words are known by Irish people, and Scholars of Irish Studies.
Irish railroad worker's grave uncovered in Pennsylvania . The real story of Paddy Works on the Railway "In Pennsylvania in the 19th century, it was said that every mile of railroad was an Irish grave. Recently, lost cemeteries have been found along the old northeastern railroad lines, hurried mass burials in improvised gravesites, often involving typhus, cholera, smallpox, and other infectious diseases that plagued poor Paddy, working on the railway."
When we left Ireland to come here,
And spend out latter days in cheer,
Our bosses they did drink strong beer,
And Pat worked on the railway.
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay
To work upon the railway.
Our contractor's name it was Tom King,
He kept a store to rob the men,
A Yankee clerk with ink and pen,
To cheat Pat on the railroad.
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay
To work upon the railway.
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TRAVEL WEST
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Whoopie Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Doggies
re-translated
** Whoopie Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Doggies
THE SECRET IRISH TRAVELLER Bain-Fhile (Woman-Poet) of "Whoopie Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Doggies" PDF explains the how the Irish language was borrowed and written down by english speakers to sound like something they could say. And the Doggy is not a dog but Irish for the poor misfortunate starving pathetic person who has only misery in their life.
In 1910 John Lomax concluded the first edition of his now canonical Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads, {introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt} with a song he called "the quintessential cowboy song, unlike others known to have been imported and adapted in the West," Whoopie Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Doggies collected from black cowboy informants. The enigmatic phonetic lyrics of this world-famous, foundational American cowboy song have puzzled scholars and American folklorists for a century. were collected from . Cowboys were also called BUCKAROOS.
Jesse Chisholm, for whom the Chisholm trail was named, was a Scots-Cherokee, His father was a Scots Gaelic speaker. Chisholm is also reputed to have spoken a number of Indian languages.
Also see: Cowboy Poetry Explained by Hal Cannon.
Casey Jones Remembered
Hal Cannon of the Western Folklife Center tells the story of legendary train engineer Casey Jones. Many consider him a mythic figure, celebrated in verse and song. But Casey Jones was in fact, real; he died 100 years ago in 1900 when his train collided with a freight train near Vaughn, Mississippi.
A glance at the folk songs and ballads of The Wild Wild West.
Folksong & Storytelling makes Wyatt Earp a legendary figure of the Wild West.
Professor Daniel Cassidy Biography Top
Professor Daniel Cassidy Director of Irish Studies at New College, CA is a writer, film maker, and musician.
Cassidy has toured with his music all across North America, playing Carnegie Hall, The Tonight Show, and The Los Angeles Civic Auditorium, as well as dive bars and juke joints from Brooklyn to San Francisco. He has written for films and television and has worked with director Francis Ford Coppola and actor Danny Glover on feature film projects. He has also written and produced six films. His documentary Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs was nominated for an Emmy in 1997. Cassidy's prose and poetry have been published in The NY Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic Monthly, The NY Observer, Ireland's Hot Press magazine, and many other newspapers and scholarly journals in English and Irish. His book The Secret Language of Poker & The Pizzazz of Jazz was published by New College Press 2005. Daniel Cassidy was born in Brooklyn, NY, and lives with his wife Clare in San Francisco.
Daniel writes: "My Fathers family spoke Donegal (Irish dialect), which pronounces teas like Jass, or chass, or t'ass). My father was born in Brooklyn on March 2, 1913. The next day, March 3, 1913, teas spelled teas makes an appearance in print! Jazz appears in print 25 times in the month of March 1913, 24 times in Scoop's articles, and once in his fellow sports reporter Francis Mannix's column."
About Professor Cassidy's father, Daniel Patrick Cassidy PDF
JAZZ IS IRISH
21st Century
Linguistic Rights
A people without a language of its own is only half a nation.
"We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too . . ."
~ Pirsig from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance"
SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING
BELIEVING IS SEEING."
FACT:
Understanding is best achieved when aspects of reality are studied in isolation from each other (biology, history, physics, language, etc.).
CONTRADICTORY FACT:
Understanding is best achieved when the holistic nature of reality is recognized so that all knowledge becomes part of a single, mutually supportive conceptual framework.
VERNACULAR ENGLISH
STIGMATIZED VERNACULARS
Dialect can be so completely absorbed into American Standard English that you'd never guess it wasn't always American English. Tracing words from Irish which are thought of as "nonsense syllables" as Irish American Vernacular English is hard work. These words aren't recognized as "borrowed" Irish words, that finally make it into American Standard English. Woefully ignorant out of date dictionaries that print "origin unknown" need to get up to speed.
DICTIONARIES, PEDANTIC SCHOLARSHIP, HISTORY AND MYTH MAKING
Notice the Irish people in this film when Gary Cooper the English Professor who is NOT a linguist goes out there to do "research". He hears the word boogie for the first time and you watch him writing his slang words. He is one of several with the authority to put it into the Encyclopedia which is only the beginning of our problems, in Ball of Fire written by Billy Wilder in 1941. "Slang is words that takes off his coat, spits on it's hands and gets to workk." ~ anon
Gene Krupa - Drum Boogie notice the ignorant "english professor" writing everything down.
IF YOU EXPECT A PERFECT WORLD See Citations, References, Tracing and Borrowing Resources:
The Sanas of Teason and the Sanas of Ráig to Rag to Ragged to Ragtime to JAZZ. Mardi Gras, "New Second Line", Jasm, Jism, Ginker, Buckaroos, Buccaneer, Pizzazz, Fizz, Fizzle, Sizzle, Big Butter and Eggman, Slum, Racket Fluke Lulu, Irish baseball words, Yippie Ty Yi Yo Git along little Doggies, House of Fire, and much much more but remember. . .
"You're just a mass of prejudices, aren't you? You're so much thought and so little feeling, professor." In this case it is about the Thought Police.
Dictionary Censors - And just like any other person, can be ignorant, arrogant, classist, sexist, out of their depth, and very wrong. Unfortunately Irish etymology of the word Jazz isn't recognized by Dictionary Dic$, publisher$, editor$, online player$, and word a dayer$ who happen to control what gets into a print a dictionary. And since you can't think without words rob an entire NATION of their memory. The Oxford English Dictionary, the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the American Heritage Dictionary all agree that the origin of the word Jazz is “not known.”
From the Goddess to the Dictionary Dics
When you get mad, you look for words that attack what represses you. In America, we are so Puritan that the swearing is mostly about sex.
Jazz is Irish, it is known.
For those who habitually quote other origins of word sites As was said in Liberty Vallance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." and that's what they do. Anecdotally, I've been to Ireland, and asked native language speakers to tell me the Irish word for heat. They do say Jazz and EVERYONE in Ireland knows it means heat! Native speakers are the real authorities. Look in your Irish Dictionary.
LINGUISTIC RIGHTS: RESPECT AND JUSTICE
LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD
Jazz is Irish. This isn't a theory, this is a fact and dictionaries do not print JAZZ IS IRISH or even that it "MIGHT" be, but print other imagined fractured fairytales aka memes instead.
Irish Subject Scholars
Evidence has been provided to pedantic "professors of english and foreign languages", so called "academics" and dictionary dicks, and dismissed, not for lack of "proof" but because they don't have the tools to evaluate the informationand they admit it. The point is that every word of Cassidy's etymologies could be correct, but people not well-trained in Irish, Music, Irish, Yiddish, Sicilian, and other stigmatized varieties/vernaculars, are not able to evaluate the scholarship that is presented here.
JAZZ IS IRISH
Print Dictionaries can be wrong, have been wrong, and have also been pressured to correct themselves by other people who have the power to publish on the internet!
2005 Example: A landmark decision was made last week with the people at Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
They have recognized the error of their ways. Beginning with the next edition, the N word NI--ER will no longer be synonymous with African-Americans. NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said that definition "doesn't say, Once used to describe a black person, a slur.' It says, A black person."
He also mentioned "The NAACP finds it objectionable that the Merriam-Webster would use black people as a definition for a racist term." The (Baltimore) Sun reported that the NAACP said it would lead a boycott against the publisher if the word's definition were not revised.
21ST CENTURY LINGUISTIC RIGHTS
What are a Nation's Linguistic Rights?
We can can have justice for the Irish word Jazz despite continued colonial tyranny keeping a people from their language and culture. You can liberate your language and for all the lost tongues of the crossroad. You now have access to the correct information about the sanas of jazz, in spite of the "thought police" who have in the past controlled print machines and had the power to censor the information from you. This is the beauty and power of the Internet.
The internet allows everyone to publish, and challenge the so called "authority at the top" by all of us at the bottom over these agonizingly contrived, tortured, and incorrect stories about this word jazz currently in print dictionaries. Only the internet can interrupt the endless $treams of the dictionary bu$iness supply chain while their power over what we are allowed to know, erodes into oblivion and becomes an forgotten blip in history. Only the internet and pressure from the public, can level the playing field and provide democracy.
CITE THE
EDUCATIONAL CYBERPLAYGROUND
If you are using MLA citing, here is an example using the "Educational CyberPlayGround" site.
Ellis, Karen: "Educational CyberPlayGround 21st Century Linguisitc Rights" Internet.
Database available online. http://www.edu-cyberpg.com.
Date accessed Month day, year.
LANGUAGE LIBERATION
WORD POWER and ACCESS
Remember: What's Personal is Political
American English, is the language of the first modern anticolonial power, which is now transforming the world, especially via its creation, the INTERNET HOME. It was born out of the 1960's hippie movement in Berkley, CA a culture who valued civil rights, equality, people power and the expansion of consciousness.
Assert YOUR Linguistic Rights
THE SANAS OF JAZZ IS IRISH.
We're always intrigued by passion, we want to get close to the flame; and Jazz is on fire.
We are the One's we've been waiting for.
Western Historical Manuscript Collection |
CROSSROADS IRISH-AMERICAN FESTIVAL CELEBRATES PETER TAMONY
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ST. BRIDGID'S HOUSE OF FIRE |
PAGE 2 Crossroads Conference 3/8/06 Honoring the work of Scholar Peter Tamony and Linguistic Rights. |
