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Daniel Cassidy: There’s a Sách úr Born Every Minute (Terence Winch)

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  Most readers of these posts share a common tool: the English language, which, as the authors of The Story of English (companion to the PBS series) wrote in 1986, “…has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language,” spoken by a billion or so people. They will also tell you that “the English language has been indifferent to the Celts and their influence.” In Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States , Bill Bryson echoes this well-worn notion: “The Irish came in their millions, but gave us only a handful of words, notably smithereens , lollapalooza , speakeasy , hooligan (from Gaelic uallacháa braggart), and slew ….” H.L. Mencken, in The American Language , credited the Irish with a minimal contribution to English: “Perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list.” Besides these examples, the one word that I remember long ago being told came from the Irish is galore . So it looked like a pretty set...
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Emily Fragos, Louise Glück, and “The Night Nurse” [Terence Winch]

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  In June of 2025, I found myself having to undergo two separate cardiac treatments at DC’s Washington Hospital Center, each visit spanning two days. Like most people, I hate being a hospital patient. The i.v.’s, the constant taking of vital signs day and night, the near-inedible food, the irritating roommate, the subarctic room temperature. Not to mention the pain and discomfort caused by whatever it is that has landed you there in the first place. The nurses were the antidote to my hospital miseries. Without exception, they were extraordinarily kind, professional, attentive. One of my nurses was a young African-American guy, another was a young white guy; all the rest were young women of color. They were all amazing, none of them ever making me feel that I was a pest or a burden. When I was discharged, I left with a feeling of profound gratitude for these dedicated young people and their empathetic souls. In the middle of the night—4.a.m., actually—on my second visit I bu...
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Commencement Speech// Contentment Is Wealth: The Top Ten Ways to Ultimate Success & Happiness in Life [Terence Winch]

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Twelve years ago, on 17 May 2014, in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, I gave the graduate commencement address and received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, Iona College, which has since elevated itself to Iona University.  Some have suggested I post the text of the speech, and so here it is. (There are parts of the speech I would like to re-write, but since I can't go back in time and deliver an edited version, I feel historical accuracy requires me to leave it as is.) ___________________________________________________________________________________ Thank you, Iona faculty & staff, friends & family.  It’s an honor to have this opportunity to speak to you, my fellow Gaels, this afternoon here at Madison Square Garden.   Like all of us vulnerable humans who finally finish with formal schooling, at least for now, you are about pursue a post-student life of fear, doubt, ambition, and self-delusion.  To assist you as you confront the univers...
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Elizabeth Sewell & Tacit Knowledge [Terence Winch]

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  In its 21 July 2008 issue, The New Yorker ran a piece by Jonah Lehrer called “The Eureka Hunt,” about attempts by scientists to explain “the insight experience,” those “moments of insight” that lead to problem-solving breakthroughs. The story is mostly set inside the brain, tracing the efforts by various neuroscientists and others to pinpoint what happens in the brain during these epiphanies. In the end, Lehrer writes, “it remains unclear how simple cells recognize what the conscious mind cannot….” Lehrer quotes one researcher: “This mental process will always be a little unknowable…. At a certain point, you just have to admit that your brain knows more than you do.” I was surprised that the story didn’t examine the ways in which creative breakthroughs in the arts resemble scientific insights. My thinking about the intersection of scientific and esthetic “eureka moments” took shape when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s. One of my most memorable teachers was Elizabet...
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Shelf Life: 1971—from The New Hibernia Review, fall 2023 [Terence Winch]

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  The way I got my first real job was to me a miracle. I was finishing up graduate school as a doctoral fellow at Fordham University in the Bronx and needed money now that my fellowship stipend was about to expire. A college classmate of mine named Terence Hegarty, who worked at Dover Publications in lower Manhattan, helped me get an interview there for an editorial position. But I had no real professional work experience. I had worked as a construction laborer for four summers; I was a movie usher for a while when I was fifteen; I was a temporary postal worker one Christmas vacation when I was eighteen; I spent the summer of 1969 working the graveyard shift as an elevator operator in a swanky building on Park Avenue; I played the drums in ceili bands in the New York area for years. When I was sixteen, I spent the summer as the drummer in a very strange trio that played six nights a week at the Emerald Isle House in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, the so-called...
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Visiting Raftery the Poet in the Cemetery of the Poets [Terence Winch]

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                        Bronze statue by Sally McKenna of the poet Antoine Ó Raifteirí, located in Kiltimagh, County  Mayo  Many decades ago, my brother Jesse took a beginners’ course in the Irish language. Out of that experience, he memorized a short, beautiful poem by Anthony Raftery , usually called “Mise Raifteirí.” On a visit to Ireland in October of 2016, he suggested that we visit Raftery’s grave, which turns out to be in the vicinity of the town of Loughrea, in county Galway, the same area where our mother was from. So, with our cousin Martin Flynn and our good friend Dominick Murray, we took the short ride from the Flynn household in Cahercrea to the Reilig na Bhfilí (Cemetery of the Poets) in Killeeneen where Raftery is buried.                                Terence Winch at the poets' cemetery where Raftery is buried in Galway....
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