Young women, it seems, do not like freckles. Why, I don't understand; I tend towards Dryden's approving view of these little spots "whose dusk set off the whiteness of the skin". A young lady from Carlow town who does not want to be named wrote to ask where the word came from. She has freckles, she confided, and hates them.
Freckles are spelled frackles in a tract on surgery by Lanfranc, written around 1400. A century and a half later another medical tract gives the intriguing information that "lac virginis taketh awaie frekles of ye visage". Shakespeare, in a reference to the cowslip in A Midsummer Night's Dream, wrote: "In their gold coats, spots you see, Those be rubies, fairie favours, In those freckles live their savours."
Freckles, and its rare singular, are lovely words that evolved from the older English word frecken(s). This is what Chaucer called them in The Knight's Tale: "A fewe frecknes in his face y-spreyned." The origin of the word is the Old Norse plural freknur. Modern Danish has fregne.
From a Waterford teacher came a query about a word heard in the schoolyard. A little girl came complaining that another seven-year-old "is always narlin' at me". It's a long time since I heard this; it is nowadays spelled gnarling, and it means, you'll have guessed from the sound of it, grumbling, snarling. But my correspondent has a right to her spelling; this is how the word is found in the Shyp of Folys of 1509, in a passage which gives a clue as to the word's onomatopoeic origin, an imitation of the snarling of a dog: it has "Though all be well yet he none aunswere hath save the dogges letter, glowming with nar nar."
Shakespeare has this meaning in Richard II: "Gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite." His, and the Waterford child's word, are figurative meanings of the verb gnarl, to gnaw, bite at, nibble, a word now found only in England's north country and in Somerset in the south. A frequentative from the verb gnar, a word that has its counterparts in the Teutonic languages: modern German has knurren, to grumble snarl; Swedish has knorra and Danish knurre with the same meaning; Middle Low German has gnarren, and Middle Dutch gnerren, to grunt; Old English has gnyrran and gnyrende, the latter rendering the Latin stridens in the Saxon Leechdoms of c. 1000.
I am grateful for the old word, Mrs O'Brien.