A little Irish cultural tidbit

From my favorite medium, NYTimes.com, a great article about a gentleman who wrote a book on slang. American slang, he says, is derived from Irish Gaelic. Being Irish, I rather like this theory. Plus, it's a linguistic topic, so let's just say I'm smitten. Dude (from the Irish 'duid'). It's an interesting etymological undertaking, and I'm pleased because I feel like we always figure that slang comes straight from our more formal language, and is just colloquialisms of the grammatical and proper form. But it's not that way! In fact, it's far more interesting. My personal favorites of the examples cited are 'grifter' and 'dork.' To think they come from Irish Gaelic!