John McCarthy, who was born near Cappamore, Co Limerick, wrote to me from London recently about a word often used where he grew up. The word is, as John spelled it, maalley, and it was usually heard in the phrase `acting the maaley', which meant behaving in an overbearing fashion.
Well now, I know about maaley due to the generosity of Donal Curtin of Mayorstone Drive, Limerick, who sent me 15 pages of Irish words used in the English of his county. Maaley, he explained, is meathlai in its Anglo-Irish form; and the meathlai was the leader or pace-setter in a meitheal, or band of workers engaged in commmunal activity such as helping a neighbour out at harvest time, or saving his hay or turf. The anglicised form is still to be heard, I'm glad to say.
Another of Mr Curtin's words is moigli, which for the benefit of people whose Irish is rusty or non-existent I'll offer the quasiphonetic (and not too accurate) spelling, mwigley. Moigli is an adjective meaning soft, mild. you might refer to moigli weather, or a moigli woman, though not to her face, I would think.
Seamus O SaothraI from Greystones sent me the Westmeath clissy. This was said to a girl: `Aren't you the little clissy!' Clissy is cleasai. a trickster. But what, I wonder, is the origin of another of his words, floovrus, pudding custard-and-jelly and the like.
Tom Donnelly, writing from Blackrock, Co. Dublin, tells me that in the Kildare of his youth a sullen, grumpy fellow would be described as mothered. Why so? he asks. Molly-coddled by the mammy to such an extent that he didn't mix well with others? No. I've heard people in south Carlow speak of the mothered water of the Barrow when they meant turbid from rain, so the mothers are innocent. Mothered is from the Irish adjective modartha (try motherha) gloomy.
Up North now, to Bangor, to where Mary Wise has been trying in vain to find the origin of the verb to feal. This word, unknown in the south, as far as I'm aware, means to hide, to conceal. It's known all over northern England, as well as in Ulster, but The English Dialect Dictionary hasn't recorded it in Scotland. There is a proverb from Cumbria which says, `Them at feals shall find.' In a tract from 1570 `to feale' is glossed `abscondere'. The word is from the Old Norse fela, to hide.