English- Irish and American

The war of the words - Book News | Literature & Books Reviews & Headlines |The Irish Time - Wed, Oct 16, 2013: "Proceeding from the premise that Irish was vastly underacknowledged as a source of English words, he mined the mother tongue for a whole quarry-load of derivations: those of “dig”, and even “jazz” (from “teas”, meaning “heat”, he suggested)
included.
He was like a frontiersman, staking claims to the linguistic wilderness. And like many frontiersmen, he was soon under fire from counter claimants, his death in 2008 not entirely ending the conflict.
His book’s premise, at least, was beyond argument. Almost a century earlier, HL Mencken had expressed puzzlement at the paucity of acknowledged Irish loan words in English. “Perhaps shillelah, colleen, spalpeen, smithereens, and poteen exhaust the unmistakably Gaelic list”, Mencken wrote, exaggerating only a little."

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