designer43 's Profile

Being hooked on the Lost Generation, bathtub gin and mah-jongg was totally romantic and equally harmless, but it cloaked the 1920s in a nostalgic glow that bore only passing resemblance to historical reality. For that I finally turned, sometime in the 1960s, to that extraordinary book "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's," by Frederick Lewis Allen. Published, astonishingly, almost exactly two years after the stock market crash of October 1929 that wrote a conclusive finis to the decade, the book immediately proved at once a useful antidote to '20s romanticism and proof positive that this was indeed a remarkable and unique period in U.S. history.

...Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.”

“Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch. He found the word “balbhán,” meaning a silent person, and he surmised that it was why his quiet grandfather was called the similarly pronounced Boliver.