To my great surprise I heard a Carlow woman refer recently to a dressing table as a toilet. I thought that this meaning had been dead since Alexander Pope's day. He, you may remember, used it of Belinda: "And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, Each silver Vase in mystic order laid." Pope also knew "toilet" as the process of making up, which is what he had in mind when he wrote, "The long labours of the toilet cease", a sentence which might be misunderstood nowadays, even between Borris and Mount Leinster.
A French import, toilette was in its country of origin the diminutive of toile, a hunting net, a cloth, a web. It came from Latin tela, a web. In its new home it was at first a cloth used for wrapping up clothes. Then it became a towel placed on the shoulders of a client by a barber or around a wound by a surgeon. Then it became a linen cloth covering a dressing table, and, as I've said, afterwards the table itself. The Americans first designated a lavatory a toilet; the Europeans in turn reimported this word to replace older words now considered vulgar.
D.M. MacDermott from Elphin, Co Roscommon, tells me he and his neighbours have been searching in vain in their dictionaries for the local word splurt. This dialect word, which means "a spurt; a splutter, explosion; a sudden start or movement" was according to the EDD, who thus defined it, obsolete by 1900. Ah no. It is quite common here in the south. A neighbour's child who had poured a half bottle of ketchup over her dress explained that it splurted out. Of unknown origin, like its cousin, spurt, I'm sorry to say.
M. Hegarty from Fanad asks about the origin of aizel, a red coal, an ember.
"Aizel" came to Ulster from Scotland, via Old English ysle, a glowing ember. There are variants, essel, easle, isel, isil, found in Scotland and south of the English border as far as Essex, where a distinction was made in the old days between the burning relics of wood and straw; as castes of straw and embers of wood. Burns, in Halloween, has, She notic'd na an aisel brunt Her braw new worset apron. The Old Norse for an ember was usli; I once heard an Antrim man describe Co Down women as oozley shelties. He was speaking of their hot tempers, I think.