"YOU seem to know a bit about horses, unlike your fellow Yellowbelly, John Banville, who told us last year that he had discovered the lovely word surcingle and was waiting for a chance to use it," wrote Flor Crowley, who forgot to put his address on his letter, which has a Bandon postmark. "Anyway, could you tell me anything about a word I've heard horse traders use over the years? You often find an ill used horse whose hair, just below the withers or on his back, has turned white from the rubbing of a badly fitting saddle. The phrase I've heard is `that's bad peel'. Is this the same peel as in `to peel an orange' or is there a more interesting history?"
Peel in orange peel is from Old English pilian, to strip off the outer layer. The horsecopers peel is from French, peler, used in ancient times to mean to lose hair, to fleece. Both pilian and peler are from the latin pilare, to make bald, from pilus, a hair.
I'm not with you about John Banville's surcingle, a beautiful word, I agree, meaning a girth for a horse to keep the saddle in place. The word is from Old French surcengle, from sur, over and cengle, a belt, from Latin cinguhm. The Irish is the even lovelier sounding sursaing.
Speaking of horses, my tentative incursions into the speech of the travelling people brought to light that the word they so rightly hate, knacker, was to them, in days gone by, an honourable and proud appellation.
In the 19th century the word was usually spelled nacker, and a nacker was a saddle or harness maker. Collins now gives (k)nacker as "Irish slang, a despicable person"; but I know old Wexford farmers who told me that in their fathers' time the nacker, the travelling harness maker, was a very welcome guest indeed. He saved the expense of a long journey to town to have surcingles, bridles and saddles mended by some brogue maker who wouldn't know a peel from a bog spavin.
An old word, this nacker, as may be seen from its ancestors, the 16th century English nacker, saddler, and the Old Norse knakkur, a saddle.
The same Old Norse word is the ancestor of knacker, a person who buys horses for slaughter, and, Collins assures me, also a person who buys old houses with the purpose of demolishing them, selling their interiors for scrap, and building new houses in their place. Isn't there a more genteel word for that knacker? A developer, isn't it.