TO be thrilled is, nowadays, a very pleasant, uplifting experience. Six hundred years ago a person who was thrilled might say a short Act of Contrition and hope that the next person to come around the corner would be a surgeon or a physician, because he would, more than likely, have been skewered by a knife or a sword. The Middle English verb thrillen, an altered form of thirlen, meant to stab, perforate; thyrlen came from the Old English noun thyrel, a hole. (The word nostril can be traced, in part, at least, back to thyrel; etymologically it simply means "nose hole", and nose-thyrl survives to this day in Yorkshire.)
The word thrilled was used metaphorically by Shakespeare's time. One could by then be thrilled by any strong emotion, like the servant in King Lear who was "thrill'd with remorse". Two hundred years later Wordsworth, in The Wagonner, wrote, "His ears are by the music thrilled"; he too used the verb in a metaphorical sense. By then a third sense of thrill had become established - to vibrate, to quake. This is what Scott had in mind when he wrote of a man "exhausting his voice in shrieks and imprecations, that thrilled wildly along the heath", in The Black Dwarf (1816).
The older thirl is still alive and kicking in many English dialects, and in Antrim and Down, where the Scots influence is strong, it has the meaning to turn up, as the thatch of a roof might be, by the violence of the wind. "The wun thirled the thatch last nicht", wrote W.H. Patterson in his Glossary of Antrim and Down English in 1880. Jean Hunt sent me this meaning from Belfast. She hopes, she says, that the history of these old Scots words will not be forgotten in any new programmes implemented by Mr McGuinness's Department of Education.
Jack Mackey from Waterford recently began to wonder about the history of the word swindler. The word comes ultimately comes from the Old High German verb, swintan, to vanish, to lose consciousness. This is akin to Old English swindan, to vanish. From swintan came the Middle High German verb scwindeln, which meant "to be dizzy"; from this they made schwindler, a giddly person; later, an extravagant schemer and a cheat. It was introduced into English cant in the mid-seventeenth century by German Jews; it quickly came into universal use, and Nathan Bailey, in the 1882 edition of his dictionary, gave it his blessing as standard English.