I thought this post to the Irish Diaspora list might be of some interest to
ATHG listers.  If you can wade through all the linguistic derivations,  the
comments on alcohol and Irish rovers are quite interesting.


Brad Kadel
History Department
Luther College


----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2001 12:30 AM
Subject: Ir-D Docs, Dookerers, and the Irish Diaspora


>
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Docs, Dookerers, and the Irish Diaspora
>
>
> Irish America, Dookerers and Docs: A Reply to Dr. D.  FitzPatrick's
> Assertion
> That The Irish Diaspora Is Imagined and Invented
>
> One of the words used by the Southern Irish (American) Travellers for
> fortune
> telling and magical psychic powers is dooker. In Gammon or Cant, the
> language
> of the Travellers of Ireland and America, a person gifted with this
"second
> sight" is called a dookerer. It may be that the Gammon word dooker is
> derived
> from the Irish word draiocht, which means druidic art, magic, and
> enchantment. The Gammon word is created by the camouflage technique of
> syllabic reversal; so draiocht becomes dooker.
>
> The use of the sobriquet "Doc" by many grifters of both the long and short
> con throughout the United States may owe as much to the cant word dooker,
as
> it does to bogus claims of medical expertise, or the peddling of nostrums,
> laced with laudanum, or alcohol, from the back of a Medicine Show Wagon.
The
> old American slang word for doctor, "croaker," is derived directly from
the
> word kro:ker, which is Irish Traveller Gammon for doctor. So, too, the
> American slang verb "to croak" or "to die" may be a cousin to kro:ker or
> croaker.
>
> In those old Medicine Show days, before Doc came out to peddle his notions
> and potions, the itinerant musicians gegged, playing reels and jigs, clog
> dancing, and then passing the hat among the country people. Geg in Gammon
> means to beg. The word gig, as in a musician's gig, may be derived from
the
> Gammon term geg, combining both performance and a passing of the hat.
> Finally
> the Cant word for drink is lus, pronounced lush. Webster also defines the
> word lush as a noun "of unknown origin" meaning "intoxicating liquor:
> drink;"
> or "an habitual drinker, a drunkard."
>
> So the caveat, first transcribed by Nelson Algren, that you should never
> play
> cards with a man named Doc or eat in a place called Mom's, gains a whole
new
> fourth dimension. Doc the Croaker as Doc the Dookerer may be  the real
> Wizard
> of Oz of the 19th and early 20th century. The memorable "Duke" of
> Huckleberry
> Finn also, in fact, may have been ,modeled on an Irish Traveller, posing
as
> an English Player. Though, more likely he was in Gammon: an od niucs (from
> Irish do "two" and ceann "head", as in two pence), old Southern Irish
> Traveller cant for a tuppence thespian or no rent actor,
>
> I agree with Dr. D. Fitz P. There is no Irish Diaspora, in the sense that
if
> it exists it does so only as a figurative double helix of immigrant
> pathologies twisted onto a racialist narrative of whiteness and imagined
> inchoation. I would argue that the only true Irish diasporic formation is
> that of the 8-15,000 Northern and Southern(American) Irish Travellers,
> precisely because they are always verging on invisibility or absence
> (kaydok from Irish dofheicthe, invisible) and are forever "On the Road"
like
> Kerouac's mythic boxcar dharma bum and devotee of St. Theresa. The 40
> million
> are in reality the 8,000 who are in reality perpetually disappearing. As
the
> once great Gods and Goddesses of the Gael were first ehumerized and then
> banished as Sidh to the fairy mounds, so too, an kaydock dookerers, the
> disappearing tricksters, of the faux Irish Diaspora will fade to a whiter
> shade of pale like dying griwogs caught in the radiant lights of scholarly
> discourse and ceant.
>
> Bing Crosby crooning Irving Berlin and Barry Fitzgerald's Protestant
brogue
> in John Ford's The Quiet Man are no more than  the subverting cultural
> markers of a aracinated deme of 40 million Fake Irish Americans, 90% of
whom
> are more genetically and culturally akin to tribes of Hengist and Horsa
than
> the moribund marcher septs of the Relanta (Irish) and their betaghs.
>
> To sum up my thoughts on The Doctor FitzPatrick and BAIS mini-muss: An
> feel's
> grooskeels tom. That fellow punches hard (at the air).
>
>  I, for one, am one hand clapping.
>
> Daniel "Doc" Cassidy
> San Francisco
>
>