IAN Shuttleworth of Bunbury Avenue, Belfast, had heard the verb to boak only in his home area of north Lincolnshire until he came across it in east Belfast. It means to retch, vomit to belch. Mr Shuttleworth wonders which way did the tide flow: did boak reach Belfast from across the water, or did Ulster people bring it with them to the towns and fields of places like Lincolnshire?
Boak is found in many places under the many guises, bock, balk, bouch, bouk, bowk, boac among them. The word has been located all over Britain, from Scotland to Kent and Pembrokeshire. The word was regarded as very coarse in England, but the earthy Scots had no trouble with it. In 1807, that down to earth observer of Scottish social customs, Beatties, tells us about a genteel Aberdeen party at which "some were boukin ahint the door."
The word is still common in Donegal. From Middle English bolken, bulken, to belch, throw up, from Old English bealcan, same meaning.
Tom Smith from Rathfarnham was born nears Carrick, Co Monaghan, four score years ago. A word of his youth is coppulhurish. It means a see saw. He wonders where it came from.
Well, some say that it is from the Irish capall thairis: "horse over, or across, it." Dinneen has capall corrach, a term I heard used by a Rosses woman, Mary Sweeney from Meenbanad, in the late 1950s. She sat at her window watching a few kids setting one up in her street. She hadn't seen a capall corrach since she was a wee wain, she said, a long time ago, aye. She was approaching 104 at the time. Corrach in this phrase means uneven, unstable. Perhaps hurish was transmuted into corrach. Stranger things have happened to words.
An interesting word this capall of ours. In Ulster Irish and in Scots Gaelic it means a mare rather than a horse, entire or cut. The word does not correspond to the Latin caballus, according to the scholars: they point to a modified form such as cappillus.
Caple, capul, capyl and capo are found in Scots, and in the English of Chester and Lancashire. Shadwell in The Lancashire Witches, a play of 1682, has "I am turned into a horse, a capo, a meer titt." Chaucer wrote of "bothe hey and cart, and eek hise caples three" in The Canterbury Tales. We find "Conscience on his capul" in Piers Plowman. The Icelandic is kappul. All from that mysterious cappillus, I suspect, rather than borrowed from our old word for a work horse.