The origin of Shenanigan as "sionnach uighm" is very questionable. Seems like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Hooligan definitely does come from Irish, from a troublesome family O'Houlihan
A few other interesting English words that come from Irish:
Galore (from Go leoir, meaning a lot), bother, a slew of, phoney, bog and bogeyman, and unsurprisingly "whiskey".
Smithereens is my favourite!
There is a bit of a cottage industry going in manufacturing Irish etymologies though, you can find someone somewhere claiming just about every unusual English word came from Irish!
Sudden occurrence of multiple usages in a particular region (California), where many Irish immigrants were working, and a plausible explanation from Irish Gaelic,
Original gaelic Irish word 'sionnachuighm' meaning to play tricks - rough pronunciation at that time 'shinnuckeem'.
is enough for probability.
The Gold Rush, like many other economic frenzies, gives us many novel words for fraud:
> The "Philadelphia Times" (Nov. 5. 1877), in defining the word skullduggery [which Bartlett calls "a very good and very common word in the West"], says, "Its best Eastern equivalent is shenanigan, although the less complicated word hornswoggling [which Bartlett also identifies as "Western"] rather directly translates it."
"Secateur" is the French language word for "shears" - it is singular... But has it been imported into English language as plural by analogy to "shears" ?
What a great debate. I would have assumed it's Gaelic in origin based on the sound and the fact that a lot of Famine-era Irish immigrants were in California at the time, but the comments from Irish speakers indicate it's not likely.
There was a lot of flexibility and inventiveness in the English language and modes of communication at the time (mid 1800s). Besides the flood of immigrants and the rise of literacy and mass media, this was the era of the telegraph and the Pony Express. The US Postal Service measured mail in the half ounce at the time (https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/domestic-letter-r...), which led to a creative method of saving postage and writing paper called "cross writing" (https://easygenie.org/blogs/news/mysterious-letter-from-the-...)
"Shenanigans"..."shenanigans", "shenanigans"...Oh, of course! Shenanigans comes from the Greek word "συνάντηση" (see-NAN-dee-see), which means "meeting". How do you do shenanigans? You meet with people. There you go.
Words are made all the time. I love how the new generations invent such apt words / slang. I hope we never cure death because the young rejuvenate society with their energy and mindset.
This shouldn't be downvoted; it is certainly a thought-provoking assertion, and seems true to me at the first impression. Many new words come out of slang from young people, who are much less likely to have "professional" level grasp of language that someone with a lot of higher education will have; the second kind will be more like to lean on existing words from obscure sources they read.
The last Oxford Word of the Year was "goblin word", which does sound like it comes from young people, who likely don't have expert grasp on existing language. The full list[1] does contain words like "youthquake", "post-truth", "climate emergency", "squeezed middle" which are likely to have been coined by a much older crowd with more higher education. The second kind of phrases feel much less new, even though both these and "goblin mode" are made up of existing words.
Conclusion: claim seems correct but more research needed.
People making new words sometimes don't have a command of existing words that are not out of the ordinary, wielded by plenty of folks with just a high school diploma.
Now "post-truth", "climate emergency" and "squeezed middle" are hardly new words. The first one is just applying the highly productive prefix "post". Anyone with a decent command of English can do this. E.g. Rust programmers are envisioning a "post-C" tech landscape. "Climate emergency" is just an obvious word combination: there is an emergency and it has to do with climate. Someone in 1920 could have pointed to the new Coca-Cola bottle and remarked on its squeezed middle.
In the case of shenanigans, I don't suspect that the person who coined it didn't know of ways to express the idea.
Shenanigans is one of the words which expresses, "things are going on that don't sit well with me/someone for some reason", which is a variation on "I don't like it".
People are attracted to new words in this area, because it isn't interesting or original to make remarks about not liking something. A fresh word adds color to it.
> Words are made mostly by people who have poor command of existing words.
I think they are optimizing for the culture (which includes new technologies and methodologies), which shows competent command. These new words are memes in the most useful sense and they do not limit themselves to other cultures' (even past versions of their own) vocabulary.
Some people may imagine this degenerates into a condensed "newspeak". The defacto human behavior is to generate utilitarian permutations, so this is unlikely to occur or be maintained organically.
Someone once said something to the effect of, imagine what a drag it would be if people from say the 1500’s were still around. And likewise, they said, imagine how annoying it would be for people hundreds of years from now if we the people of present day were still around all those years in the future. Thank heaven, they said, that we are mortal and our lives are short.
Hooligan definitely does come from Irish, from a troublesome family O'Houlihan
A few other interesting English words that come from Irish: Galore (from Go leoir, meaning a lot), bother, a slew of, phoney, bog and bogeyman, and unsurprisingly "whiskey".