A reader from Lurgan who asked me not to name her wrote to me recently about the compound linsey-woolsey. She is perfectly well aware, as any decent Northern Irishwoman would be, that this is a mixture of wool and linen, but she tells me that where she grew up the term had a figurative meaning: a motley composition, a medley of meaningless words, oul' guff.
She'll be interested to know that Shakespeare also used the term figuratively. In All's Well that Ends Well, the Second French Lord asks: "What linsey-woolsey hast thou to speak to us again?" Middle English lin is linen (hence our Irish lin); -sey is simply a nice little rhyming suffix.
The same lady sent me the word muss, a scramble, a free-for-all. She remembers the old days when it was customary at society weddings for the groom to fling small coins among the waiting children at the church door; an unholy muss would ensue.
The great Elizabethans and Jacobeans knew this word. Ben Jonson in Magnetic Lady has: "The monies rattle not, nor are they thrown to a jus muss yet among the gamesome suitors." And our friend Shakespeare in Anthony and Cleopatra has: "Of late, when I cry `Ho!' Like boys into a muss, kings would start forth, and cry `Your will?' "
Nobody is sure where the word came from. Cotgrave, who compiled a famous English-French dictionary in 1611 has the game called musse as one of the senses of French mousche, now mouche, literally a fly. For centuries it was thought that muss came from mousche; the theory has now been discarded, however.
Although mouche is the name of more than one game, Oxford points out that the sense "scramble" has not been shown to occur in French, and says it is probably that Cotgrave's explanation was suggested by the similarity of sound in the English word.
As for the verb muss, as used in such phrases as "he mussed up my hair", all the great dictionaries say that this is 19th century American onomatopaeic alteration of mess.
But there are other, prettier musses. Muss, the mouth, is still heard in many parts of rural England. John Skelton had this in Speke Parrot (1529): "Goddys blessyng light on thy swete lyttyll mus!" Muss was defined by John Florio in his Italian-English dictionary of 1598 as "a sweethart, a daintie mop". These two musses probably came from Old French muse, mouth, muzzle.