"My friend", said his Cork-born wife to Seamus Flanagan of Westfields, Limerick, "was in pottles of tears." He asks me to elaborate.
Well, pottle hasn't yet been consigned to the dialect dictionaries, though I'm told it's on the way. It was formerly a liquid measure equal to two quarts; then it came to mean a pot or tankard holding two quarts; then the liquid in such a pot; then booze in general; then any small container, such as a strawberry punnet.
"I'll give you a pottle of burnt sack," says Ford to the Hostess in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare refers to a pottle-pot in Henry 1V, 2: Shallow: By the mass you'll crack a quart together, ha! will you not, Master Bardolph? Bardolph: Yea, sir, in a pottle-pot.
Well, "pottles of tears" was a fair old weep: the word itself is from the Old French potel, a diminutive, from pot, pot, from vulgar Latin pottus.
I am reminded of that interesting work potwalloper. Formerly it meant a man who qualified as a voter in some English borough by having a separate fireplace in which he could boil his very own pots. Nowadays the word means a kitchen worker of low grade, such as a dishwasher.
The word is an alteration of the earlier potwaller, from pot + waller, from wall, to boil, from Old English weallan. The formation of the word as we now know it was probably influenced by the dialectal wallop, to boil hard.
As I was sitting in front of a hotel television set in Wexford recently, watching a game of what nowadays passes for hurling, the man at my side commented that a certain player was "as ill as a pig". I could discern no indisposition except perhaps a mental one which caused him to pull rather wildly at everything that moved: an inquiry led to the explanation that ill meant not sick but stubborn.
I thought since of Shakespeare's ills. Bad: "I told thee they were ill for a green wound in Henry 1V, 2. Inauspicious: "There's some ill planet reigns" in A Winter's Tale. Adverse: "Against ill chances men are every merry" in Henry 1V, 2. Sick: "He that made me knows I see thee ill," in Richard 11. Incompetent: "I am ill at these numbers," in Hamlet. The Wexford shade of meaning is in English since the 11th century. Its origin, and the origin of all the other ills, is the Old Icelandic illr, bad.