Tribute To Frederic G. Cassidy

Picture of Frederic G. Cassidy

FREDERIC GOMES CASSIDY
OCTOBER 10, 1907 - JUNE 14, 2000

He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading,
And to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.
William Shakespeare, Henry VIII

Frederic G. Cassidy,  DARE's Chief Editor since the inception of the project, died on June 14, 2000.  Associate Editor Joan Houston Hall, who has been on the DARE staff since 1975, succeeds him as the new Chief Editor.  Please be assured that the DARE staff will continue the project and complete it in his honor.

Additional tributes appear in the Spring-Summer 2000 issue of the DARE Newsletter.

In Memoriam: Frederic Gomes Cassidy

By John Algeo

      Fred Cassidy belonged to a select tribe of twentieth-century scholars of American English respected for the depth of their knowledge, admired for the breadth of their interests, and loved for the humaneness of their natures. Their names roll off one's tongue like a Carl Sandburg poem or a magical incantation:

Clarence Barnhart, Charles Fries
Margaret Bryant, Philip Gove
Arthur Kennedy, Louise Pound,
Albert Marckwardt, Kemp Malone,
Raven McDavid, Thomas Pyles,
James McMillan, Allen Walker Read.
      In beginning such a list, the maker finds himself in the quandary of the Oxford divinity student whose final examination had only one question: "Distinguish between the major and minor prophets." After some deep thought, the student answered the question with tact and concision. He wrote: "Far be it from me to draw invidious distinctions among holy men." If a favorite name is missing from my list, attribute the lack, not to an invidious distinction, but causa pro metrica. There can be, however, no questions that among the majorest of the prophets of our tribe is Fred Cassidy.
      Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Fred immigated with his family to the United States on the eve of his teen years. After attending Oberlin College and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1938), he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he celebrated the anniversary of his 120th term (or 60th year) in 1999. His scholarly work embraced many subjects, including Anglo-Saxon, English composition, Jamaican English, the place names of Dane County, fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas, and of course preeminently the Dictionary of American Regional English.
      Fred was, however, not only a scholar; he was also a person of charm, generosity, culture, and gemütlichkeit. He had what the Chinese call jen, or 'human-heartedness'. He was a Mensch. He mentored (to use a currently fashionable neologism) several generations of budding scholars, sometimes in ways he was not even aware of. If I may be forgiven a bit of personal reminiscence, I can cite myself as one who was deeply influenced by Fred, even though my contact with him was usually at some distance and only sporadic. In fact, he was key to two turning points in my life, so I have always regarded him as an academic godfather.
      I first met Fred between the pages of a book. On beginning graduate studies at the University of Florida, the first course I took was the History of the English Language, for which the textbook was Cassidy's revision of Stuart Robertson's Development of Modern English. I had been enticed into graduate school by Tom Pyles's Words and Ways of American English and was decisively converted to the study of the English language by Cassidy-Robertson. That was the first turning point.
      Some years later, when I was seeking asylum from Graduate School administration at the University of Florida by accepting a professorship at the University of Georgia, I had a call from Fred. He was chairing a committee concerned with the future of the journal American Speech, then unconnected with the American Dialect Society but published by Columbia University Press. The magazine was nearly three years in arrears of publication and seemed destined for desuetude. ADS members who were concerned about its prospective loss to the tribe had arranged with Columbia UP to assume responsibility for the journal and its editorship. Fred wondered if I would like to become its first ADS editor. I had no editorial experience, no periodical experience, and little else to recommend me. But I said yes, and that was a second turning point in my life.
      I cite Fred's influence on my life only as an example I know well of what I also know to be his much wider influence on the lives of many. As a person, Fred was just as genuine as he was as a scholar. But it is his scholarship that crowns his public achievements, and the jewel in that crown is the Dictionary of American Regional English. I was at the ADS meeting in the bosom of the MLA when Fred delivered a paper that sounded the clarion call for that work. He said that it was time for the ADS to make good on its early but thus far unfulfilled intentions to publish an American dialect dictionary. And he had a plan.
      Today the three published volumes of DARE speak eloquently in testimony to the wisdom and realism of Fred's plan. DARE is for the twentieth and twenty-first-century study of nonstandard varieties of American English what the original OED was for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century study of the standard variety of British English. It is a major work of scholarship. It is the fulfillment of a vocation of the tribe. Now well beyond the halfway point of its completion, DARE is blessed by being in the charge of another beneficiary of Fred's mentoring.
      Joan Hall, in recent years Fred's coeditor, is excellently qualified to bring DARE to its completion, and all devotees of DARE and friends of Fred anticipate the joy of that happy event. The Dictionary of American Regional English is the most significant work of scholarship ever associated with the American Dialect Society, it is a premier contribution to the study of the English language in America, and it is a monument to Fred Cassidy. Age will not wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. Of DARE, we can say to Fred:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. Indeed, there were giants in the earth in those days. We have known one of them.

Back Home

By Frederic G. Cassidy, 1994

I've been places, places, traveled
most parts of the world. Seen the great
wonders of nature, of mankind
that fill the eyes, shake the brain;
troubled my body with heat and cold. I
have felt shrunken beside great
things, aroused to trembling, shivering,
all my inner flesh and blood aroused
by the need to recognize, to admit to some
overwhelming force of being
of which I am an infinitesimal
atom, a nearly-nothing, spectral,
that has not forgotten the birthing-cord,
the mother-tie, the separation
that never is complete, fully complete
until we die.

For each of us there is
a corner of earth, a refuge of green trees,
a cover of clean snow, rocks firmly
heaving above the sea, unreachable
horizons, small cress-grown creeks,
hard clayey fields, that we call "home."

An infant grasps the hand of the old man.
The other grasps the earth and the waters
under the earth. If true love exists
this is a part of it.

A Good and Full Life

From the program of
A Feast for the Spirit of Frederic Gomes Cassidy
June 18, 2000
Madison, Wisconsin

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

- Vladimir Nabokov
The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
- R.L. Stevenson
Have no regrets . . . because it Isn't raining rain, you know, It's raining violets!
- 1921 Pop Song
The world is extremely interesting to a joyful soul.
- Alexandra Stoddard
Good language is the proper raiment of good thought.
- FGC
From wonder into wonder, existence opens.
- Lao Tzu

Commemorating Frederic Gomes Cassidy

By August Rubrecht

      Unlike the ones who have spoken before me, I am not an intimate member of any of the circles Fred belonged to. I have been on the periphery of DARE since I ended my year of field work in August of 1968 and turned in the keys to my Word Wagon. I do not know his family, though I did meet his wife and daughter when I came to Madison to pick up the keys to my Word Wagon in 1967.
      What I can do, I hope, is step back and give a broader perspective on the man and his contributions to his many circles.
      This weekend should have marked the completion of a different sort of circle. A few years ago I was invited to tell stories at Borders Book Shop here in Madison, as part of their Storytelling for Adults series. When Fred heard about the program, he invited me to come to Madison early so that we could visit and he could take me out to supper and then accompany me to Borders to show me the way. I gratefully accepted, and he stayed to hear my stories. The part about showing me the way was especially welcome, because I always get lost in Madison.
      This year Borders invited me to come and tell stories again on a Friday night - night before last. It would have been my turn to take Fred out to supper. Now, of course, that is a debt that will remain forever unpaid.
      This is a small thing - a very small thing - when considered in the light of his long life and many accomplishments. I am sure many of you can tell similar stories about his acts of kindness and graciousness to you. If we totaled them up, they would amount to something not small at all. Nevertheless, let us remember these small debts one at a time, because we can at least measure their scope.
      Personally and collectively, we owe him debts on a scale that means they could never be repaid, a scale that is difficult even to describe. On the personal level, when he made me a fieldworker and gave me the keys to a Word Wagon, he sent me off on the most memorable year of my life. Some of what I gathered that year became the raw material for my dissertation, making it possible for me to complete my studies and subsequently enjoy a satisfying career as a college professor.
      The most massive debt of all is the one all of us, as lovers of words and the study of words, owe to him for all those years of careful, delighted attention to the language, the fruits of which he has bequeathed to us.
      This occasion today provides an opportunity for the many circles that Fred was a member of to come together and intertwine. As we do, in addition to celebrating his life and expressing our gratitude for the gifts he left us, we need to begin the process of closing up the gaps he left - the huge holes that Joan mentioned earlier - in all those circles. The best way to close them is to share the very stuff we got from him, small and great, in our individual lives and in the circles we belong to.
      Strangely enough, I feel I must have gotten something from him today. I went back to Borders today just before the service. They had paid me for the storytelling with a gift certificate, and I was loading up on books. Before coming here to the chapel, I stood in the parking lot studying a map of Madison spread out on the hood of my car. Some kind person asked, "Can I help? Do you need directions?"
      I looked up, and in a voice full of quiet confidence, said, "No thanks. I know where I am. I know where I have to go. I'm just trying to figure out the best way to get there."
      Driving up here on my chosen route, I realized how thoroughly uncharacteristic of me that was, and how very much it sounded like Fred.