I have to thank Mrs Dympna Moore of Cahir, Co Tipperary and Maire Nic Mhaolain of Dalkey for throwing light on the word spock, also found as smock in Co Limerick - an improvised hurley. Mrs Moore quotes from Art O Maolfhabhail's Caman: 2,000 Years of Hurling in Ireland, published in 1973. He records spaic aitinn, meaning furze or whin root, from Cos Clare, Limerick and Cork. I wonder what the origin of spaic is.
Thanks to Louis Marcus for an interesting note about the noun shoddy, inferior clothing, now obsolete. It was used by Padraig Pearse in the Claidheamh Soluis in 1906. Writing about the "tendency towards slavish imitation which is the result and the auxiliary of Anglicisation", he went on:
"This hopeless subservient spirit is seen alike in the educated man who despises all things Irish as crude, and the uneducated who picks up the [to him] latest musichall jingle, in the businessman who thinks the English accent of a commercial traveller is an indication of superior goods and in the farmer who clothes his children in English shoddy . . ." Shoddy originally meant the waste from worsted spinning mills, if I may refresh your memory.
Last month a Donegal spay-woman or fortune-teller of my acquaintance offered to read my palm. I accepted the lady's offer and was told that a dark-haired woman was about to enter my life. Spay, more often written spae, is found in most of the glossaries on Ulster English. It was imported from Scotland. Burns has it in Halloween, written in 1785: "I daur you try sic sportin, As seek the foul Thief ony place, For him to spae your fortune!"
To spae by the girdle (griddle) was a mode of divination practised in Argyllshire for discovering who had stolen something. The girdle was heated red-hot and placed in a dark corner, where something made of iron was laid on it. The entire company had to go, one by one, and fetch whatever was on the girdle, with the assurance that the Devil would burn the hand off the thief. His reluctance to participate betrayed the criminal.
By the way, my spay-woman was right. A week later my granddaughter, Mary, came into the world in London, sporting a luxuriant head of sable hair. I now await with increasing confidence the fulfilment of the spaywoman's second prediction, that I am shortly to have notable success in the Lotto draw.
Spae/spay is from Old Norse spa, to prophesy, foretell.