I must ask my friend Paddy Greene, the schoolmaster of Ballinalee, about a word I heard recently from a traveller, Mr Michael Connors, in Co Kildare. Master Greene is the greatest living authority on the travellers' cant, Sheldru, but the word I heard in Kildare is not cant.
Mr Connors was relating, with an amount of glee commendable in the circumstances, how he was frustrated in selling a mare to a lady who was given an awful fright by a breeze which, in my friend's phrase, `bit the mare in the arse and med her take off like the divil from hell was after her.'
I've never before heard breeze for the horsefly in this country, although it is found in England from Northumberland to Gloucestershire.
It is an old word. Chaucer has it as breese in Balade, written in 1380: `I wol me venge on loue as doth a breese On sylde horsse', a sentiment Mr Connors would understand. Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, has: `The herd hath more annoyance by the breese than by the tiger.'
The word is in Old English as briosa and breosa. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Master Greene has heard the word in his travels. May I wish him a very happy 100th birthday on June 6th. I hope that Ballinalee paints the town red in his honour.
The late Commander Joe Dunne, who ran a famous pub in Newtownmountkennedy some years back, had a great fund of expressions used by some of his clients long before my time.
`How's your granny for breeze?' was shouted by cornerboys at young women who passed by, he told me; breeze was small coal or slack, used by poor people who couldn't afford good coal, and by blacksmiths in their forges. Coal dust is still, in places, an ingredient in the making of a builder's breeze blocks. The word is from French braise, a burning coal, from Old French brese.
And there is yet another breeze (apart from the light wind, which comes from Old Spanish briza, north-east wind). Breeze, to a motorist from Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, is the moisture which fogs up his windscreen in damp weather.
The late Phil Wall of Carne, Co Wexford, used the word of perspiration. `Of unknown origin', say the few dictionaries to have recorded the word. According to D'Acosta's History of the Indies (1604),`the Easterly winds, which they call brises, do rain.' Is that a clue to its origin? I think so.