Talk:Daniel Cassidy

How the Irish Invented Slang

The vast majority of his book How the Irish Invented Slang is fabricated, this should be reflected in this articleEomurchadha (talk) 11:07, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

I found only one book review in a journal in JSTOR. I quoted the review's conclusion, including both praise and criticism. Scenography (talk) 15:54, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

The quotation "So utterly..." needs to be replaced with a different quotation. The article needs a quotation that is more than an insult. Scenography (talk) 15:54, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Cassidy is plainly WP:FRINGE. As far as I know, none of his Irish language theories have ever been published in scholarly journals. While uninformed articles praising him are easy to come by, the same is true of other notable fringe theorists like Erich von Däniken. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and scholars that are actually familiar with the Irish language have, where they have bothered to comment on Cassidy at all, have roundly condemned him for his ignorance. Wikipedia should not be giving any credence to Cassidy's ideas without some strong, published evidence in reliable sources. Book reviews just don't cut it for that. SpinningSpark 16:30, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Cornell University

Saying that Cassidy "attended" Cornell University is saying that he did not graduate. The information doesn't need repeating. (See the shorter version and longer version.) Instead, the article needs more information—and I will help look. Scenography (talk) 06:42, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Not in my book it isn't saying the same thing. SpinningSpark 16:30, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Cassidy was a success at Cornell, according to The Cornell Daily Sun:

• Cassidy was coeditor of The Trojan Horse, the university's literary magazine (15 Feb 1963).
• Cassidy received the George Harmon Coxe Award in Creative Writing (18 May 1965).
• A professor said Cassidy was one of the finest poets to study at Cornell in the past 10 or 15 years (12 Feb 1965).

So, may I please delete the words, "but never graduated"? That fact is an uninstructive summary of Cassidy's relationship to Cornell. Scenography (talk) 06:16, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

None of that changes the facts that he was not qualified in linguistics and could not speak Irish. His abilities as a poet have no bearing on his reliability for Irish etymplogies of English words. SpinningSpark 16:23, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Can we agree to say he "studied at" Cornell University, without adding the words "but never graduated"? The source article in the San Francisco Chronicle says, "He studied English literature and creative writing at Cornell University in the 1960s." Scenography (talk) 21:21, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

How is that different from the phrase "attended Cornell University?" Why don't you want the article to say that he didn't graduate? (If you don't have a bias in favour of Cassidy.)Saineolai (talk) 13:17, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Plan to cooperate

Coeditors, what is the best way for us to work together on the Daniel Cassidy article? Should I continue with specific edits, and talk about each edit? Or, possibly, would you rather see from me a draft of the entire article, to see whether the entire article is neutral?

In isolation, one of my edits sounded like support ("attended Cornell"). But I also added criticism ("the etymologies he proposes for individual words would require a substantial amount of research before they could be taken as fact").

Would it help to discuss general matters before I make specific edits? For example, we could agree on the sources for the article. We could agree on an outline for the article.

I suggest that the article have three sections: life and works, Slang book, and criticism. The Slang book gets a section as his most notable work. Criticism gets a section to avoid undue weight.

Can we agree on the following points?

• The article will include a section about the Slang book and its claims. I added some information about the book's contents when I quoted a book review ("Cassidy's main thesis"). Before my edit, the article only mentioned "etymologies" before proceeding into criticism.
• The article will include only meaningful critique. The book review has meaningful critique, saying that Cassidy's proposals still "require a substantial amount of research." Can we agree to remove general insults ("nincompoop") and general compliments ("eureka moments")?
• The article will have criticism in its own section. For example, I hope the biographical section will say that Cassidy "attended Cornell," end of sentence. The criticism section can say that Cassidy had no degree in linguistics, or no academic degree, or whatever other information is in the sources. Scenography (talk) 00:30, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Separating the facts that Cassidy attendended Cornell and that he failed to graduate makes no sense. The site that called him a nincompoop was not merely being insulting. It is a summary of a great body of material on the site that investigated the feasibility of Cassidy's claims word by word. I would only be happy with removing the quote if it was replaced by some more extensive material from the site. SpinningSpark 11:58, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I will add to the discussion of "attended" in the Cornell University section above. Thank you for agreeing that the article will be better with information than insults. Scenography (talk) 19:51, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Suggest we remove this review: "Cassidy’s main thesis—that there are far more English words of Irish origin than are acknowledged in volumes such as the OED, and that this is due to the fact that much of the Irish influence is found among lower-status, colloquial slang expressions—is very convincing, but the etymologies he proposes for individual words would require a substantial amount of research before they could be taken as fact." This adds nothing. How can Cassidy's thesis be convincing if the evidence for the thesis is not convincing? How can anyone claim that further research will validate the claims without doing the research? The evidence suggests that further research = further weakening of Cassidy's thesis. Saineolai. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Saineolai (talk • contribs) 16:22, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Blogs

Spinningspark, his assertions are fringe and incorrect but there is absolutely no reason for us having an article like this. Which expert is signed for the material on cassidyslangscam.wordpress.com? And what exactly is the encyclopedic value of So utterly, completely stupid, only a total nincompoop like Cassidy could have come up with it? Do we have any other article on a fringe subject where snide remarks are assembled and shown as "Reviews"? – Thjarkur (talk) 17:21, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

You may have a point about the cassidyslangscam site, but I don't think that justifies the complete removal of all the criticism. The article needs to say something on this. We have a duty to our readers to identify psuedo-science and fake scholarship for what it is. I can't find any information on who Debunker is, so can only assume he wants to remain anonymous (although he has posted a photograph so someone must be able to identify him). It is thus impossible to assess his academic credential—although he is clearly fluent in the language, which is more than can be said for Cassidy. If removed, I feel the site should still be listed in "External links". It meets the criteria for that and is a good resource for readers as it examines each word individually and in detail. SpinningSpark 18:22, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Any opposition to this draft? It summarizes all I could find, including usable self-published sourced. There's just one thing, I can't find a single mention of this supposed "Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs" documentary which according to sources derived from him (including his obituary) was nominated for an Emmy award. – Thjarkur (talk) 21:12, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

That looks good to me except there is now no mention that Cassidy could not speak Irish. This generally sympathetic Irish Times article confirms that fact, at least at the point when he started this project – "Cassidy, who thought he was too old to learn Irish, was about to toss the dictionary into the rubbish". SpinningSpark 09:03, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Reversing Thjarkur's edits

I don’t know what to think about Thjarkur’s contribution. I don’t really take a lot of interest in Wikipedia because I think it’s a good idea continually undermined by human corruption and stupidity but I would prefer the Cassidy article to be as good and as informative as possible.

If you will recall, a few years ago, a man calling himself Scenography tried to edit the Cassidy article and eventually gave up and went elsewhere. He was not very worried about general criticism of Cassidy’s etymologies but he claimed to think that saying Cassidy studied at Cornell was the same as saying he didn’t graduate. He also disliked anything that treated Cassidy’s memory with disrespect, describing the quotation I added from the site Cassidyslangscam as ‘insult’. He also believed that the Cassidy article needed more information to improve it.

I don’t know who Thjarkur is or where he is based but I find it a little suspicious that he seems to have the same agenda as Mr Scenography. He has managed to remove the information that Cassidy didn’t graduate, as Scenography was so keen to. He objects to the dismissive quote describing Cassidy as a nincompoop (‘You have to be joking, yes sure let's cite "danielcassedyscam.wordpress.com" for denigrating comments…) and like Scenography, he thinks that adding more random information that happens to have appeared in newspapers and other sources will make the Cassidy article better.

My view is as follows. Under no circumstances should studied at Cornell be regarded as equivalent to studied at Cornell but never graduated. Cassidy didn’t graduate and that fact is important. Neither Thjarkur nor Scenography should be allowed to censor that information.

I added the piece from cassidyslangscam to counter the other reviews there which were misleading and biased. I have no objection to ALL the reviews being removed if people think that is appropriate. I think the article should be quite short.

Another point - I do not believe that the article on Cassidy needs to be longer. There are many far more deserving and interesting people who have no Wikipedia article at all. (For example, Jim McCloskey, who is a career linguist formerly at the University of Santa Cruz, specialising in Irish syntax, has no Wikipedia article.).Cassidy’s only real claim to fame is that he wrote a book of etymology that was almost completely wrong. Neither Scenography nor Thjarkur are disputing that Cassidy’s etymology was very bad, they just dispute that this was a result of dishonesty rather than lack of competency.

There are good reasons for reversing most of Thjarkur’s changes. While cassidyslangscam is certainly not impartial or objective and sometimes goes too far in his attacks on Cassidy and his supporters, I do not agree that his qualifications are relevant. After all, Daniel Cassidy had no qualifications at all! There are other ways of assessing the reliability of sources. Cassidyslangscam hates Cassidy but he quotes material from other sources accurately. If he says something is in Cassidy’s book or in an Irish or Scottish Gaelic dictionary, you know that the original source will match what he writes. This isn’t the case with Cassidy, whose material is often misreported and rewritten.

Unfortunately, the main reason for reversing Thjarkur’s changes is simply that the information he has added is badly written, inaccurate and factually incorrect. Cassidy claimed that ‘several’ words come from Irish, according to Thjarkur (twice). Is five hundred the same as several? Merriam-Webster defines ‘several’ as more than two but not many.

Cassidy was designated as one of the most influential Irish Americans in 2007 after the publication of his book. We now know that the book and the etymologies therein are not correct and Thjarkur seems to accept this, so this accolade doesn’t mean anything. The article should be short, so let’s cut irrelevant material like this and keep the relevant.

There are a number of spelling and other mistakes. Mantains? Magainze? Among other hundreds of other words …? Where’s the encyclopedic value in material that has been written quickly and without care? (The hundreds of other words also contradicts the word several!)

The rather random examples of Cassidy’s theories about dude and snazzy are uninformative. Thjarkur has rightly provided a link to the Wiktionary entry for the Irish word dúid but then ignores what dúid is defined as by Irish speakers, quoting a feature article about Cassidy where it says that dúid means ‘a funny-looking fellow’, which is not one of the definitions of the Irish word on Wiktionary, though it is a definition of the English word dude. The article given by cassidyslangscam on Dude goes through Cassidy’s claims, his rewriting of the Irish definitions, and the way he ignores the other possible origins. A link to it would have been far more informative about the origins of dude and Cassidy’s treatment of the word, whatever Thjarkur’s opinion of that blog. It would be nice if we didn’t have to rely on that blog but as far as I know, no academic linguist has published a detailed refutation of Cassidy’s work, so the blog is as good as it gets and however bilious and negative it is, it gives the facts.

Thjarkur says that the book is 68 pages long. On Amazon, it is supposed to be 308 pages long. A look at the actual physical book (which I have on my shelves) shows that it is 303 pages long, not including the preface by Peter Quinn. I can understand why he misread the source article by Michael Patrick Brady. That article says that the book consists of 68 pages of essays (66 in fact, 71 minus five blank pages between chapters), along with a large and badly-structured glossary. I understand that Wikipedia has protocols designed to stop people from doing original research but there should be some room for common sense. Why does Thjarkur think he is the man to edit an article about Cassidy and his work when he’s never even read Cassidy’s book? Surely not knowing anything about the subject will not produce good articles.

Thjarkur has also removed a perfectly valid piece about Cassidy’s Irish phrases largely being phrases, not individual words. These are probably the main body of Cassidy’s claims and cassidyslangscam has done a lot of good work to point out the weakness of most of these claims. Thjarkur’s claim that Cassidy relied on finding coincidences where sound and meaning happen to look similar is simply not true. There are a few such words, words like dear and daor, which mean the same and sound the same, in spite of not being of the same origin. However, about half of Cassidy’s claims rely on phrases that don’t exist in Irish, as the article said before Thjarkur’s intervention: However, in the majority of cases, he simply combined Irish words into phrases which he thought resembled English slang terms but without providing any evidence that these phrases ever existed in Irish Gaelic.

As for the comment that Cassidy did not learn Irish as a child, this could be misinterpreted as meaning that he wasn’t a native speaker but learned Irish in later life. There is no evidence that Cassidy ever learned any Irish at all.

As I said, I am a little suspicious of Thjarkur’s motives here but whatever they are, he has left the article much poorer and less informative than it was before he came along. I don’t want to enter into an edit war with him but it would be wrong to allow this factually incorrect version to stand. I will give him a couple of days to object or comment about anything he would like to keep but within a few days I will start to reverse the changes he made, beginning with the spelling mistakes and obvious factual errors. I won’t restore any of the review material. I hope that this will be acceptable to all of us. Saineolai (talk) 14:01, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree with some of your points, in particular, the implication that Cassidy actually learned Irish at some point should not stand. We have a source saying he did not know the language when he began this project, so in the absence of a source saying he became fluent (all the evidence says otherwise) we should not give that impression.

I can't support using cassidyslangscam as a source. I would like to, but guidelines say not to use WP:Self-published sources unless they are recognised experts. Since Debunker posts anonymously there is no way we can establish that. There is still a link to Debunker's blog in the external links.

Spelling errors and other typos are easily fixed and are not grounds for wholesale reverting. SpinningSpark 14:49, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

@Þjarkur: pinging in case they are not watching the page. SpinningSpark 14:55, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. Saineolai, the article was previously an unencyclopedic attack page sourced to a blog. The main problem is that very few reliable sources have actually written about Cassidy, but I have summarized what they have to say. That's the way we write articles here on Wikipedia. We're not going to cut away the award, it's notable and it's discussed in reliable sources. Reliable sources give random examples of his etymologies so it does not seem out of place to mention a few, it's interesting to know what words he suggested were Irish. Reliable sources mention him studying at Cornell, a rumor from a random blog about him not graduating is not included. You're right that I have not read this book and I've never heard of this man before, but I do not need to in order to be able to summarize what secondary sources say about him, that's how Wikipedia works. Thjarkur’s claim that Cassidy relied on finding coincidences where sound and meaning happen to look similar is simply not true, that's what the cited sources say.

Wikipedia has guidelines (WP:NEUTRAL, WP:DUE, WP:RS).

I appreciate that you're willing to improve my prose. – Thjarkur (talk) 17:04, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Cassidyslangscam site

Contrary to what I have said in earlier conversations, WP:PARITY gives some support to using sites like cassidyslangscam to counter fringe theories that are not addressed in peer reviewed publications. SpinningSpark 18:28, 12 November 2021 (UTC)