MARY McClafferty sends me a good word from Derry, a word I myself have heard many times in Donegal. Mary spells it scoodler and she says that it means a young person who helps out in the "kitchen drawing water from the pump in the yard, cleaning out after an incursion of hens, laying the table, and so on. My wife, who is a Donegal woman, uses the word as a term of endearment for a youngster.
The new Concise Ulster Dictionary has scuddier, `a young servant boy', from Scots `a kitchen boy' from Old French esculier, band an unattested hypothetical form, not found in the historical record, escudedler, Fair enough; but we find much nearer home the Scots Gaelic sguidilear, pronounced scoojiler, Malcolm MacLennan's dictionary tells us a scullion, drudge; a mean fellow.
The Surrey farmer at the National Ploughing Championship, who, like myself had escaped the rain by making for a hospitality tent, said that it was `comin' down in treddles' as we listened to it drumming on our canvas roof. God rest my old friends, Maggie Whitty from Horeswood in south Wexford, and Paddy Doyle, who came from near St. Mullins in south Carlow, both of whom had the word treddles for the marble shaped dung of rabbits, hares and sheep. This old word is from Old English tyrdel, Middle English tirdel, tridel, a diminutive of turd. My Surrey friend, unaware that treddles is a dialect word and not standard, was surprised at my delight at hearing it again.
Another good word that was alive in south Carlow when I was young was swope, a drink, and as a verb, to drink, to guzzle. `He'd swope the Barrow dry'. Variants are found all over England and Scotland; and in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy long ago, they had zap. Related to the more common sup, from Old English sopa, old Norse sopi, a mouthful.
A word P.J. McGowran heard near Monaghan town many years ago is traivly, an adjective used exclusively, he tells me, of saucy young girls. A trawly girl was, in the euphemistic speech of the more matronly females of the day, a girl who stayed out late at night. This trawly comes from the Irish noun traill, a slave, a wretched person. Nothing like a trawly girl to put a grush on the oul wans of yesteryear. Grush is also a good Monaghan word. There it means an unpleasant face; its Irish antecedent, gnuis, simply means face, appearance.