THE word fordel is common enough in the literature of Scotland. It means, first of all, progress, advancement. He has made little or no fordel complained Sir Walter Scott of Hogg, the Etterick Shepherd, a master of the Scots language who spent most of the day sleeping before the huge fire of the Abbotsford kitchen, instead of writing for his keep as had been agreed.
A Wicklowman I know has brought the word back from the oil rigs of the North sea. He uses it as an adjective. `Come on', he said to me, `leave that fordel work; it will be there for you when you get back.' Fordel work, he explained, was work that needn't be done immediately.
Sure enough, the dialect dictionaries have the word. It means to store up, to hoard for the future, according to the most reliable of them. Fordel rent is rent paid in advance, and fordling is a stock or provision for the rainy day.
There are many Wicklowmen working out of Aberdeen on the oil rigs and I wonder will all the good Scots words they pick up ever be assimilated into the rich language of their county. At any rate this fordel, sometimes fardel and furdel, is the same word as Middle Englishfordele, advantage. The Dutch word it came from is voordeel, advantage, furtherance.
Wicklow has absorbed many words from the older English, as well as from the Norse, Norman French and Irish. It's some years now since I saw an over horsed young man, poncing for the benefit of the lady members of the Bray Hunt go arse over head into a dyke filled with cold, swift flowing water, near Barndarrig. An onlooker, a local farmer, called the dyke a gool.
Gool, sometimes gull as John Clare has it, is defined by the dialect dictionaries of England as a watercourse; a ditch. English readers please note that in Ireland a ditch is not a dyke; it is a bank that separates fields. A rider often has to negotiate a dyke or gool (an English ditch) on either side of it. Anyway, gool is found mainly in England's North Country, and it, was brought there, and into Ireland, by the Normans, who had goule, mouth of an animal, a word they borrowed from Medieval Latin gula, as found in gula fluvii, the mouth of a stream or river. I'm sure the young fellow we fished from the Wicklow gool would have been pleased at the time to know that.