You'll hear many's the good word for the state of inebriation around Christmas and the New Year. I asked a man in a Wicklow pub if he would like a pint, and he refused, saying he was foundered. I had never before heard foundered used to denote full to the gills. In Wexford, Kilkenny and Carlow, to be foundered means to be exhausted, prostrate with fatigue. The word has another meaning. Used of horses it means lame.
W.H. Patterson has it in his glossary of Antrim and Down words (1880); Miley O'Brien, a Wexford Traveller and horse dealer, predicted in my august presence last week that half the horses out with the Brays would come back foundered because of the heavy ground; a bit before Miley's time, one Jonathan Swift wrote of galloping a foundered horse 10 miles up a causeway; and still further back, Geoffrey Chaucer in The Knight's Tale mentioned that "his hors for feer gan to turne and leep asyde and foundred as he leep". Pity Miley wasn't around. He'd have sold him a sound one in a gleet of an eye.
This second meaning of the word is found in Scotland and in northern England. Foundered is from Old French fondrer, to submerge; to collapse. Fondrer is rare in Old French, but is common in the compounds esfondrer and enfondrer, with a variety of meanings, such as to burst, smash; of a boat, to fill with water and sink; of a building, to fall down. The ultimate origin is the Latin fundus, bottom.
Gillery is a word sent to me by a Bangor, Co Down, correspondent, Alison Baird. It means deception, fraud, trickery. It's to be found in some of the older glossaries written in the north. The English Dialect Dictionary, which has the word from Antrim, says it is also found in England's north country, south to Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. There is no sign of it in Scotland. The Lincoln Chronicle, writing about the football hooligans of 1888, says that the game was "mixed up with the greatest gillery, roguery and blackguardism". Gilery is found in the York Plays of c.1400. It's from Anglo-French gillerie, trickery, from guiler, to beguile, deceive, and thus related to the noun guile.
May the Christmas season be gleesome with you, as they used to say in south-east Wexford. I was pleasantly surprised to hear the word recently in Lady's Island. Glee is from Old English gliw but gleesome is not recorded before 1603. It's a good word for merry. Fan og!