Words We Use: The Meaning of Words And Where They Come From

One of the most valuable books about words and their origin, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots: Second Edition, has recently been published. Its author is the distinguished Victor S. Thomas professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard, Calvert Watkins.

Indo-European is the name given for geographic reasons to the large and well-defined linguistic family that includes most of Europe’s languages, past and present, as well as those found in the vast area extending across Iran and Afghanistan to the northern half of India. In this book Watkins reconstructs the protolanguage, ‘a glorious artefact, one which is far more precious than anything an archaeologist can ever hope to unearth’, according to another distinguished scholar.

Typographical problems prevent me from showing some of Prof Watkins’s most intriguing detective work, but here are a few examples to whet your appetite. The ancient root and its meaning are given first; he gives the modern word next, working backwards towards the root.

ag-es- fault, guilt. ACHE from Old English acan, to ache (perhaps ‘to cause mental pain’).

badyo- yellow, brown. A western Indo-European word. BAY from Latin badius, chestnut brown (used only of horses).

Band- a drop. Possibly Irish BAINNE, milk.

bhrem- to growl. Latin FREMITUS, from Latin fremere, to growl, roar. (It has been suggested to me that the Irish BROIM, a fart, has its ancestors in the Indo-European root.)

wopsa- wasp. Metathetised form, unattested wopsa. 1. WASP from Old English wœsp, wœps, from Germanic wasp. 2. VESPIARY, from Latin vespa, a wasp.

pleus- to pluck: a feather, fleece. 1. FLEECE, from Old English fleos, from unattested Germanic fleuzas. 2. Suffixed form, the unattested plus-ma. PLUMATE, PLUME, PLUMOSE, PLUMULE, DEPLUME from Latin pluma, a feather.

medhu- honey, also mead. 1. MEAD, from Old English meodu, from unattested Germanic medu. 2. AMETHYST, METHYLENE, from Greek methu, wine.

bhrater- brother, male agnate. 1a. BROTHER, from Old English brothor, brother. b. BULL, from Middle Dutch broeder, brother. Both a and b from Germanic brothar. 2. FRA, FRATERNAL, FRATERNITY, FRATERNISE, FRIAR, CONFRERE, FRATRICIDE, from Latin frater, brother. (The Irish bráthair, brother, is also from frater.) 3. PHRATRY, from Greek phrater, fellow member of a clan. 4. PAL, from Sanskrit bhrata (stem bhratar-) brother.

swer- to cut, pierce. SWORD, from Old English sweord, sword, from Germanic swerdam.

Prof Watkins makes this Proto-Indo-European language as compelling as it must have been 6,000 years ago. His great dictionary is published by Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston and New York at $20 (€15.27) paperback.

Whenever I mention Indo-European roots I get enquiries about why those roots seem so different from the English words associated with them. Well, these roots have grown over a period of more than 4,000 years and have spread into more than a hundred languages. But by tracing vowel and consonantal changes, by separating suffixes and midfixes from the basic stems, scholars have been able to follow seemingly quite different words back to a single root. I have mentioned Calvert Watkins’s work, and Shipley’s anecdotal and wonderfully enthusiastic foray into this field in The Origin of English Words; it is, as one critic put it, a diverting expedition beyond linguistics, history, folklore, anthropology, philosophy and science. No specialist knowledge is required for you to enjoy it.

Take the Indo-European root abel. It originally meant fruit of a tree, and in time became Irish abhall and English apple. Not content with a definition, Shipley strolls on to tell us that an apple-pie bed may be a corruption of French nappe pliée, folded sheet. He strays further afield and tells us the history of the tomato, love apple in English once upon a time, and in the 18th century considered an aphrodisiac. Then out of the blue he quotes Leigh Hunt who, having just completed two years’ porridge for libelling the Prince Regent, wrote a little rhyme for children: ‘Stolen Sweets are always sweeter, / Stolen kisses much completer; / Stolen looks are nice in chapels, / Stolen, stolen, be your apples.’ Because of the meaning of the original root, Shipley says that there remains a question as to the exact nature of the fruit Eve ate, a bit of which stuck in the throat of her man, ‘still a sign of the first sin, the Adam’s Apple’. Another diversion then as a savoury. ‘The world had a pleasant beginning / Until Adam spoiled it by sinning; / We hope that the story / will end in God’s glory, / But so far the other side’s winning.’

Dealing with aiu, vital force, long life, eternity, which gave Greek eon, Latin aetas, aevum, English age, Irish aos, he gives us oul fellows a slice of La Rochefoucauld to consider: ‘Age loves to give good precepts, to console itself with being no longer able to give bad examples.’ And this, as a consolation: ‘King Solomon and King David led very merry lives, / With very many concubines, and very many wives; / Until Old Age came creeping, with very many qualms: / Then Solomon wrote the Proverbs and David wrote the Psalms.’

Diarmaid O’Brien from Limerick wrote to ask if he and I are correct in spelling our first name as we do, and if those who spell it Diarmuid, as the Archbishop of Dublin does, are wrong. He also wants to know if the name is acceptable as a Christian name in baptism; he knows of a priest who questioned the matter recently, saying it is a pagan name.

A man is entitled to spell his name whatever way he pleases, but that said, Diarmaid is the historic, and therefore the correct way. Diarmait was how it was spelled more than a thousand years ago. It was one of the best-loved names in those far-off days. Scholars have been arguing for generations where the word came from. Many say it has its origin in di, without, plus formad, envy, jealousy, but not all agree.

The great story of the pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne, influenced to a degree by the story of Adonis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, has, it is believed, been in the repertoire of storytellers since the 9th century, although the earliest recension we have of the full story dates from the 15th. No doubt this story kept the name Diarmaid, one of the great tragic lovers of literature, in the hearts of the people all those years; but there have been saints of that name as well.

Among the saints are Diarmaid Mac Mechair, patron saint of Magheraboy, Co. Fermanagh, whose feast day is 16 January; Diarmaid of Inis Clochrann, on Lough Ree, whose feast day is 16 January; and Diarmaid of the royal house of Ulster, founder of Castledermot, Diseart Diarmada in Irish, whose feast day is 21 June.

The national schools of the 19th century went to town anglicising Diarmaid. It appeared as Jeremiah, Miah and Jeremy. Dermot, quite acceptable methinks, was used as far back as Swift’s time.

‘The inferior sort o’ people, ye’ll observe are kent by sorts o’ bye-names, some o’ them, as Glaiket Christie, and the Dewke’s Gibbie’, wrote Scott in Guy Mannering in 1815. I am pleased to inform you that a bye-name is still used in parts of County Down for a nickname, or a name other than the one registered at baptism or marriage. The late Tomás de Bhaldraithe once told me of being asked by the courts to help solve a problem which had arisen over claims to land in west Cork.

Everybody seemed to be Greens and Whites in the place concerned, and yet the land was registered in the 19th century to nobody but O’Sullivans. The explanation was that to distinguish between the two local O’Sullivan clans, Ó Súilleabháin Glas and Ó Súilleabháin Bán, the former were known only by their bye-name Glas, which the National Schools translated as Greene, and the latter by the bye-name Bán, turned White by schoolmasters, and afterwards by solicitors.

At any rate, Helen Blake from Bangor asked if the word bye-name or by-name is found in Ulster only. I certainly heard the word often in south Leinster; and the English Dialect Dictionary tells me it is common in the north of England and in Cornwall. It is old. Holland’s Plutarch’s Morals (1603) has ‘He got himself a by-name, and everie man called him Epaminindas.’

‘Once upon a time, and a long time ago it was, I knew a chap from Co. Clare whose name, may God forgive his parents, was Hyacinth,’ wrote an anonymous correspondent whose letter had a Limerick postmark. ‘For a girl, fair enough,’ went on my correspondent, ‘but for a man! The poor devil vowed to change his name by deed poll as soon as he could raise the wind.’

I cannot remember what native Irish name was replaced by Hyacinth by the national schoolmasters and their clerical masters in the 19th century, to comply with Department of Education regulations. Diarmaid became Jeremiah in Cork, for example, and Finín and Fionán, boys’ names, became Florence in the same county.

I must point out to my correspondent that Hyacinth was originally a boy’s name. He was a Spartan, the son of a king, and he was so beautiful that the god Apollo fell in love with him. The trouble was that the god of the west wind, Zephyrus, also fell for this handsome Hyacinthus. Zephyrus was insanely jealous, and one day as the boy and Apollo were playing quoits, Zephyrus caused the heavy disc thrown by Apollo to veer from its course and clobber the young fellow on the head. He died on the spot.

In his memory, the grief-stricken Apollo caused a flower to grow from the earth where the boy had died, forever afterwards called hyacinth in his memory.

In a Co. Wicklow hotel recently, while her mother was making a phone call ten feet away, a young lady whispered to me that if I bought her a coke she’d give me a kiss. She informed me that she was 5, that her mother was meanie, and that her name was Tiffany. Such precocity couldn’t go unrewarded; with her mother’s reluctant permission I bought her the coke. I got no kiss, of course.

I wondered about the origin of her name. It seems to be from Old French tifinie (c.1200) or tiphanie: there are more than 40 variants. The words come from the Latin theophania, applied to the Epiphany. Its Greek origin, theophanie, means the manifestation of God to man.

Not until Holland, the classical scholar, mentioned it in 1601, did tiffany, the dress material, appear in literature. He wrote of ‘the invention of that fine silke, Tiffanie, Sarcenet and Cypres, which instead of apparel to cover and hide, shew women naked through them’.

Tiffany, the sexy material, was a word confined to England; it may have been short for Epiphany silk, but nobody knows for sure. Perhaps it had to do with the sense of manifestation; the Epiphany is the feast of the manifestation of Christ to the Magi, and in the Eastern Church, of the baptism of Christ; the word is from the Greek epiphaneia, an appearing.

How did the word become a woman’s name? I suppose it was given to girls born on 6 January, just as Noël, Noëlle and Nollaig are given to children born at Christmas. The first Tiffany or Theophana of note was a Byzantine lady who married a German king, Otto II, in 962. She made the name popular in Europe; its chief home was in Armorica whence, as a grumpy Englishman declared, ‘William de Coningsby / Came out of Brittany / With his wife Tiffany / and his maid Manifas / And his dog Hardigras.’

Some sources say that this lassie gave her name to the revealing silk, but there’s no proof of that. Another famous Tiffany, whose name is also given as Tiphanie, Theophanie and Epiphanie, was the wife of the Norman Bertrand de Guesclin. She used to predict lucky and unlucky days for her husband; the trouble was he never read her predictions until disaster happened. Then, of course, he blamed her.

The name is not as popular now as it used to be, young Tiffany’s mother, an Englishwoman, told me. A pity.

Imet a man the other night who told me that I should publish, some day, a glossary of terms of contempt. I might do that; I am constantly coming on beauties from all over the country, courtesy of correspondents who are, like myself, amused by them.

The word firkle came my way recently from John Boyd from Bangor, Co. Down. The English Dialect Dictionary has it from Co. Antrim, where somebody called a neighbour ‘a dirty firkle’. It probably came into English from the Low German ferkle, which gave the identical word in Modern German, meaning a pig.

Gick, which came my way from P. Morrissey from Waterford, means a fool, a stupid, clumsy fellow. More often spelled geck, it is found as well in Carlow and Wexford; it was imported from England where it is common in Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Yorkshire and Cornwall. Shakespeare has it; we find ‘The most notorious geck and gull / That e’er invention played on’, in Twelfth Night.

I see that George Eliot has the word in Adam Bede: ‘If she’s tackled to a geck as everybody’s a-laughin’ at’.

The origin of the word is the Dutch geck, ‘a foole’, according to Henry Hexham’s English-Dutch dictionary of 1647.

Gick/geck should not be confused with gink, a term of reproach applied only to a girl considered frivolous by old-fashioned women in the southeastern counties. I can’t find it in the dialect dictionaries, though there’s a Scottish ginkie, a term of reproach applied to a light-hearted girl.

There is the American slang gink, a pejorative term used only in reference to men, which has reached Ireland. P.G. Wodehouse has it in A Damsel in Distress: ‘I’m certain this gink is giving her a raw deal.’ Of unknown origin, I’m afraid; the Scottish ginkie is much older than the slang word, but they may be related.

Grissy is a word I heard many moons ago in the schoolyards of Kilkenny. It is a cruel word, said to taunt somebody fat. It is an old word though, from the Old Norse griss, a young pig, a banbh.

A buddion is an offensive term used by boys of other boys in Fermanagh, the late Joan Trimble once told me. This is from Irish boidín, a diminutive penis. A peeodler is a northern word for a mischievous person. Loreto Todd has it in her Words Apart, a Dictionary of Northern English. It’s from the Irish péadóir, I think, a meddler, trickster, according to Dinneen.

Slang, it has been said, is born away from the light, and its birth is often mysterious. Rosemary Holt from Monkstown, Co. Dublin, asks about the origin of the word wimp, an ineffectual also-ran, and all I can say is that none of the numerous suggested origins I have come across is to my liking.

I offer this as a guess, no more than that: from the English slang wimp, a girl, woman, itself a word of unknown origin.

Some time ago I suggested that the word wimp, a spineless ‘wet’ person, is the same word as the London dialect word wimp, a girl. P.G. Beaumont from Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex, wrote to offer another theory. ‘A few years ago’, he says, ‘I attended a lecture given by a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The following was suggested. In the 19th century potential army recruits were given a medical and the results entered in a ledger. Those who failed were discharged, with the reason listed as WIMP, which meant with insufficient military presence.’

Interesting, but Oxford insists that the word was born in America in 1920; that it is of uncertain origin, but possibly related to whimper. It asks us to compare the dialect wimp (of a dog), to whine. I suppose the new Oxford considered this theory of mine as well, and dismissed it. Ah well, like Oxford, I’m entitled to my own guess.

Alf Mac Lochlainn, librarian and scholar, wrote from Galway about the word louser. He remembers coming across an anti-Cumann na nGaodhal election flyer which quoted, against him, of course, something Michael Tierney had said about the unemployed: ‘The lousers won’t work.’ Recently he came across a book of Scots verse, published in 1921 in London, Bonnie Joann and Other Poems. In it, its author Violet Jacob wrote: ‘The years are slippin’ past ye like water past the bows. / Roond half the warld ye’ve tossed yer dram but sune ye’ll have to lowse.’ My friend wonders was Tierney, the classical scholar, using the word very correctly, however offensively, to mean ‘idlers’, and not as his opponents thought, people infested with lice.

Yes, I have no doubt that louser and lowser are simply variant spellings, and that they have nothing to do with louse, the bug (Old English lús). The English Dialect Dictionary has a couple of pages on louse / lowse, a form of ‘loose’. It hasn’t got louser, an idler, but it gives a Yorkshire variant lowsing, a noun. To lowse / to loose, means, among other things, to leave off, to stop working, to idle, to lead a vagabond life.

Hence, a pit stopped for the day before the proper or usual time was said to be lowsed out. The general idea was to loosen, unfasten, unbind; to lowse cattle was to let them loose to graze; to lowse the table in Yorkshire meant to say grace, so that people could begin to eat. From Middle English los, loose, from the Old Norse lauss.

Mary Lavelle, Australian-born if not bred, wrote from Melbourne to ask if I’ve heard an expression used by her mother, who came from the county of Mayo—lyrakeen peebora. She knows that it is Irish, but has never found out what it meant. Her mother used to say: ‘That fellow is about as useful as a lyrakeen peebora.’ It was applied to useless footballers, politicians—and, on occasions, husbands. ‘I hope it’s not anything obscene’, she adds, with admirable concern for my innocence.

Mary’s expression is a transmutation of laidhricín píobaire, a piper’s little finger; I’m given to understand that the laidhricín/lyrakeen is not used in playing the uileann pipes. Twenty years ago, that man of words, Fr Leon Ó Moracháin, recorded the phrase in Louisburgh, near Clew Bay. I wonder if it is still in the west in either Irish or Irish English.

As I was trawling through some Ulster glossaries the other day I came upon the expressions Dingley-cooch and Dinglety-cootch. ‘He’s gone to Dingleycootch’ means he’s done something discreditable, according to Patterson (Antrim); and to ‘send a man to Dinglety-cootch’ means to send him to Coventry; a very common expression in the north, according to the English Dialect Dictionary. From the Kerry town Daingean Uí Chúis, anglicised Dingle, ‘from the remoteness and inaccessibility of that place’, the English Dialect Dictionary explains. No comment.

I was surprised to read recently that the slang word swank, noun, verb and adjective, and the adjective swanky were becoming obsolete.

The noun has the meaning ‘ostentation or pretentious behaviour or talk; swagger, pretence’, according to the Oxford Dictionary. This meaning, I would venture to say, is not common in Ireland. It came into general English slang from an old dialect word found in the English midlands and in the south- west. It was first noted in print in Baker’s Northamptonshire glossary of 1854: ‘Swank: an ostentatious air, an affectation of stateliness in the walk. What a swank he cuts.’

The noun came from the verb. The etymological meaning is uncertain, but perhaps the original notion is that of a swinging in the body; this would mean that the word is ultimately related to Old High German and Middle High German swanc, swinging motion; Middle High German swanken (Modern German schwanken), to sway or totter. The first mention of the verb in English is in a Bedfordshire dialect glossary of 1809, which gives ‘Swank, to strut’.

Swank and swanky, adjectives, can be traced to Middle Low German swank and Middle Dutch swanc, and originally meant supple, active, agile. Robert Burns described his Auld Mare as swank when he meant active, full of herself, and swanky was in use in Scotland as far back as Dunbar’s time; he uses the adjective in Flyting (1508).

Dunbar, Ramsay in 1715, and Elliot in 1756 show that swanky to them meant strapping, smart, active, and all three used it of young men. Ramsay says ‘The young swankies on the Green Took round a merry tirle.’ Mourning the Scottish dead (‘the English for ance, by guile wan the day’), Jane Elliot wrote in her great farewell to the young men ‘e’en in the gloaming, nae swankies are roaming, / ’Bout stacks with the lasses at bogle to play: /But ilk maid sits drearie, lamenting her dearie / The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away.’

Swanky, meaning posh, was first given to the world in a Wiltshire glossary of 1842. It seems to be alive and well in Ireland and I hope it doesn’t die out.

I recently heard a story about an incident which took place in a Co. Carlow restaurant involving a waitress who used a word bordering on the obsolete, I should think, to describe a customer.

The gentleman in question, prior to a dignified and unhurried departure, had told her that a local politician, who was at the time drowning his sorrows with some election workers out in the bar, had kindly insisted on paying for his substantial meal.

It became obvious some time later that this was not the case. She called the duplicitous one, hind; what your man, the unsuccessful county council candidate, called him, we may guess.

A hind in parts of the south-east is a boyo, a rascal. I’ve heard the word in my youth in west Wexford and in south Carlow by the banks of the lordly Barrow. The word is common still all over Scotland and England, but I note that the Irish shade of meaning has, according to the English Dialect Dictionary, been recorded only in Norfolk.

In both Scotland and the northern counties of England a hind was, in the old days, a farm labourer engaged by the year and provided with a house, firing, milk, meal and potatoes. Little or no money changed hands. Often a stipulation was made that the hind must furnish a female farm worker, usually a wife or daughter, at an agreed price per day, with an extra wage in harvest time. She was called a bondager. From hind came the adjective hindish, rustic, clumsy, clownish, and of course my waitress’s noun.

The word’s prevalence in the speech and in the literature of Scotland would suggest that it must also be found in Ulster, but I can find no mention of it in the dialect dictionaries.

Hind was formed from Old English hi(g)na, genitive plural of hiwa, higa, member of a family, a servant. The d is excrescent.

Some time ago, in answering a query about the word barge, to scold in an abusive way, I mentioned that Oxford, not sure of the word’s origin, offers the guess that it is a back-formation from bargee, people known for using colourful language. I’ve been thinking recently about Oxford’s uncertainty. I suggest that barge is the same word as Scots bairge, still heard in parts of Down and Antrim, to raise the voice in a threatening manner. The Scots word is, the American 19th-century etymologist Smythe-Parker claims, from Old French barguigner, to wrangle, argue. Barguigner is, he claims, from baragouin, confused speech, gibberish, a word the Celticist Stokes says is from the Celtic bara gouin, bread and wine. I’ve written to Oxford about Smythe-Parker’s theory. Watch this space.

Jonathon Green’s excellent Words Apart, The Language of Prejudice (1996) is, I believe, still in print, and I recommend it to everybody interested in words. I was particularly amused by his few paragraphs on the use of insects as terms of vilification. Speaking about his political rival Lord John Russell, Britain’s prime minister Benjamin Disraeli remarked: ‘If a traveller were informed that such a man was leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect.’ Disraeli could be a particularly insulting cove, but he regretted bandying racial slurs with Dan O’Connell, who in answer to a crack about his breeding, said that Dizzy was undoubtedly the descendant of a certain unrepentant thief.

Anyway, that disgusting insect, the cockroach, is, and has been for centuries, used as a term of abuse. The ancient Romans called it latta Germanica, the German insect. The Germans, in their turn, called the creature Russe, literally Russian; its well-known indestructibility gave rise, it is thought, to the phrase er ist ein Russe, he is a glutton for punishment, he’ll stand for anything. The Russians got their own back by calling the Germans Prussak, which means both Prussian and cockroach, while the Hungarian russzzni means both Russian and a cockroach. The Yiddish preissn, Prussians, is also a cockroach or any creepy-crawly insect.

The French have had their fair share of entomological slurs. In Poland the cockroach is a francuz or Frenchman; the Germans have the term Franzose. The Iraqis have been known to call the Iranians Perzus, which also means a roach. And the people of the German state of Swabia, now overtaken by Bavaria, were called Schwaben by the Austrians—you’ll have guessed it—cockroaches. Great minds thinking alike may have given the Hungarians the nod to call the Swabians svab or svab-bogar, a Swabian beetle.

The terms louse and louser are still common in Ireland, but are used only of individual people. The Dictionary of the Canting Crew, published in London in the early 18th century, defined Louseland as Scotland, and a Scotch louse-trap as a comb. Captain Francis Grose in his late 18th-century dictionary of underworld lingo underlined the slur by calling Scotland Itchland and Scratchland, and the Scots Itchlanders.

The above are trivia from a deep and fascinating study of the aggression, bigotry and xenophobia of common speech. It may offend the squeamish and the politically correct, which is not a bad thing, come to think of it.

The word braggadocio was coined by Edmund Spenser. In his day young English gentlemen used to take off for the continent in springtime and as part of this holiday a long stay in Italy became a fixed tradition. There they developed a taste for Italian clothes, fine wines and exotic regional food. When they came back to England their exaggerated manners, their tales of personal conquest and their swaggering behaviour made them the target of satirists who called them macaronis after the Italian dish favoured by the lower orders. Spenser’s word for a swaggering fop, the name of his allegorical figure of a coward in The Faerie Queene, he coined from brag plus an Italianate ending.

It is a curious construction. Bragadoccio or Bragadocchio would have been more persuasive Italianate forms. This creation of Spenser’s brags and boasts of his great courage, of his impregnable shield, and of the fair lady he has rescued through his valour and who is hopelessly in love with him.

Enter various outraged champions who show him up for the liar he is; they take from him the things he has stolen. They take his lady from him as well, and drive him away humiliated. John Kelly from the Coombe, with whom I shot the breeze at a christening lately, asked about the word.

Not far from the town of Dungarvan I recently heard a strange word which I jotted down as lunjous. An old man of my acquaintance used it to describe a bad-tempered, quarrelsome, vindictive person. I had never previously heard the word in Ireland, but Wright’s great English Dialect Dictionary had lungeous, lungus, lunjus and lunjies from various places north of Warwickshire, and from a few places in the southern shires. It adds ‘awkward, clumsy, unmannerly, rough, violent in play’ to the meanings given above. It is also used as an intensive in places: ‘It’s lungeous cold this mornin’ wi’ this here black east wind’ was recorded in Lincolnshire.

Wright doesn’t attempt a guess at an etymology, but if I’m correct the word has an extraordinary origin. I think it’s a variant of a word found in the literature of the Tudors, lungis, sometimes lungeis. Lyly in Euphues (1579) has ‘If tall they term him a luigeis, if short, a dwarf.’ Lungis to both Lyly and to Beaumont and Fletcher was a long, clumsy galoot. The Citizen’s Wife in The Knight of the Burning Pestle laments over Ralph the Apprentice after one of his attempts at how’s your father: ‘O, husband, here’s Ralph again!—Stay, Ralph, again, let me speak with thee. How dost thou, Ralph? Art thou not shrewdly hurt? The foul great lungies laid unmercifully on thee: there’s some sugar-candy for thee. Proceed; thou shalt have another bout with him.’

Lungus, if Oxford is correct, is by way of Old French longis from Longinus, the apocryphal name of the Roman centurion who thrust his spear into Our Lord’s side; by popular etymology associated with the Latin longus, long. The Waterford man’s lunjous is surely the Tudor lungis, and if so it has the blessing of our greatest dictionary. A most interesting survival it is.

Another good word for a lout, usually one of no fixed abode and no visible means of support, is the Ulster gangrel, sent to me by Anne Gallagher from Letterkenny. An old word this. Hampole speaks of ‘gangrels and langelers’ in his Perfect Living (1340); Burns, in Jolly Beggars, has ‘a merry core o’ randie, gangrel bodies’. It’s thought to be from gang on some obscure analogy, according to the Oxford Dictionary; the ending occurs, though perhaps from diverse sources, in several depreciative terms, as haverel, mongrel, wastrel. Gang, a set of things or persons, is Teutonic in origin. For example, the German gang applied to a set of things—of cartwheels, horseshoes etc.

In Scotland and in northern England the Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx word cearr, wrong, awkward, left-handed, has taken root in a variety of forms. The most usual is car, a word sent to me by Joan Hunt from Blackrock, formerly of Carlyle. A 1450 sage informs us: ‘The wisdome of the wys man is on his rycht hand, and the fule is in his kere hand.’ Car-handed, left-handed, is still used in north Yorkshire, and Henderson’s folklore of the North Country assures us car-handed people are not safe to meet on a Tuesday morning. Farm labourers are apt to turn back from their work and go to bed on meeting a car-handed neighbour, he says. Proper order.

Mr Joe Hayes of Limerick wrote to ask what the origin of the word gawky is. A gawky hurler, he says, is one whose right hand is placed before his left on the hurley; an amalach sort of player, says my correspondent. Amalach means awkward, and gawke is defined in Grose’s great dictionary of 1790 as ‘an awkward type’. It is cognate with the French gauche. It is a well-travelled word. Burns has ‘Gawkies, Taupies, Gowks and Fools / Frae colleges an’ boarding schools’; and Taylor, a lesser man, advised a friend in 1787: ‘Go hame and woo some country gawkie.’

‘Don’t let that kitter-handed ass tune yur car,’ said a man to an Armagh correspondent, Ruth Warke, recently. She wants to know the origin of kitter-handed.

I first heard this expression from Willie O’Kane of Dungannon. The English Dialect Dictionary has katty-handed from Ayrshire. ‘It was very incommodious for me to be on the left side, as I have been all my days katty-handed’, was recorded in 1820.

Well, you have the Irish ciotach and the Classical Irish cittach, meaning both left-handed and awkward. Of course, there’s the cognate ciotóg, Irish English kithogue used by Carleton and a host of other 19th-century Irish novelists, and by Joyce in Ulysses. It means a left-handed person. Ciotógaí (Irish English kithogey), a term of disparagement for an untidy workman, was recorded in the English of north Kerry.

Should we look no further than Irish then? Well, you see, there is a Norse connection further back. There is the North Frisian käitig, left-handed, and kei, awkward; the Swedish dialect kitja, the left hand; kaj-händ, sinister.

As I was sitting in front of a hotel television set in Wexford recently, watching a game of what nowadays passes for hurling, the man at my side commented that a certain player was ‘as ill as a pig’. I could discern no indisposition except perhaps a mental one which caused him to pull rather wildly at everything that moved; an inquiry led to the explanation that ill meant not sick but stubborn.

I thought since of Shakespeare’s ills. Bad: ‘I told thee they were ill for a green wound’ in Henry V, 2. Inauspicious: ‘There’s some ill planet reigns’ in A Winter’s Tale; Adverse: ‘Against ill chances men are ever merry’ in Henry IV, 2. Sick: ‘He that made me knows I see thee ill’ in Richard II; Incompetent: ‘I am ill at these numbers’ in Hamlet. The Wexford shade of meaning is in English since the 11th century. Its origin, and the origin of all the other ills, is the Old Icelandic illr, bad.

I wonder would an Antrim farmer I met recently know the word langel, sent to me for comment by Annie Maguire from Clones, Co. Monaghan. She defines the word as ‘a long, thin, strake of a man’. That’s a figurative meaning of the word, which as a noun means a tether connecting a horse’s or a cow’s two forelegs, used to hobble the animal; there is also a side-langel connecting a foreleg and a hindleg. Langel used as a verb means to hobble and, figuratively, to tie down: ‘She has him well langled.’

The late Peadar O’Casaide from Monaghan once told me that ‘to get out of the langle’ was an Ulster way of saying to go out on the spree. Langel is also found in Scotland and in northern England. Its ultimate origin is disputed. It may be from an unattested Old French langle, itself from Latin lingula, a thong, or it may be of Scandinavian origin. Macafee’s Concise Ulster Dictionary suggests that we compare the Norwegian dialectal langhelda, literally ‘long hold’.

The same correspondent also asks what the origin of rullion is. Which rullion, Annie? One is a wheel for winding yarn, which comes from the Irish roithleán; the other is a big, ignorant lout, or a big animal. This is a very interesting word. It has a Scots origin, a rough shoe made from untanned leather; from the Old Norse hriflingr, a ‘rawhide shoe’.

An old anonymous friend of this column, who calls himself Mary Willie in honour of a famous Tipperary hurling pub, has taken up his pen again to complain about the riff-raff who caused damage to a train during their journey home after that Munster hurling championship match against Waterford. He wants information about the term riff-raff, for which he also sent some Tipp equivalents, unprintable in a family newspaper.

Riff-raff comes from the Middle English ryffe raffe, from rif and raf, ‘every single bit; one and all’. There was a corresponding phrase rif no raf (neither rif nor raf) which meant ‘nobody or nothing at all’. These two phrases came from Middle French rif ne raf which meant ‘completely’.

Related to French rifler, to plunder, and rafle, a sweeping up, Collins’s Dictionary says (and, incidentally, therefore related to both rifle and raffle).

Oxford and Webster agree; but Oxford throws in a caveat. What about the Swedish rafs, rubbish, and rafsa, to sweep together, to huddle up? it asks tentatively, pointing us north away from the Romance languages.

Anyway, by about 1470 we find riff-raff in the modern sense of hooligans, the dregs of society. A chronicle from around that time has ‘Many a man was mortheryde and kylde in that conflycte, I wot not what [to] name hyt for the multitude of ryffe raffe.’

Busybody preserves Shakespeare’s meaning of busy, meddling, mischief-making. Hamlet, having stabbed the eavesdropping Polonius, says, ‘Thou find’st to be too busy in some danger.’

Oberon speaks of the meddling monkey and the busy ape. The busy bee has now become our exemplar in honest living, but Henry Vaughan and John Donne used busy as did Shakespeare.

Vaughan sang to ‘Dear Night, this world’s defect, / The stop to busie fools, Care’s check and curb.’

John Donne, on whose amours the morning’s light intruded, protested to that ‘Busy old fool, unruly Sun’; and in his 20th Elegy, he bids his lover ‘Unpin that spangled breast-plate which you wear / That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.’ Which is very nice talk indeed for a future Dean of St Paul’s.

An acquaintance of mine, a Donegal woman, was talking about a certain politician. He was, she said, a wulla sort of man. Michael Trainor, in the dictionary of Donegal English, published in the 1950s, spelled the word wullach and defined a wullach man as ‘excitable, inclined to extremes of moods’.

As to where the word came from: in Scotland they have wallach, a noisy, blustering, demonstrative person. They also use the word as a verb, to wail, to scream, to cry as a child out of humour does. It may have come to Donegal from Scots, but it is Gaelic in origin. Consider uallach, vain, proud.

Dinneen, always keen to use what he perceived as the weakness of the female sex to explain his adjectives, has ‘ruidín uallach—a flighty little creature’. This Irish and Scots-Gaelic word is from uaill, pomp, vanity, vainglory, from Old Irish uall.

Helen McGinley, who wrote to me from Rathmines, doesn’t say where she hails from, but I can guess. She asked first about traikle, a lazy person. Well, traikle is from traik, which has many shades of meaning. To traik means to walk about, to loaf, to stroll, to wander, to stray, to get lost. ‘He’s none of your birds that traik’ is a Donegal expression