IN Bram Stoker's story, Snake's Pass, set in Mayo and published in 1891, we find the word mulvather. It means to confuse, bamboozle, and the EDD informs me that it is not found outside of Ireland. I've never heard the word but I'm reliably informed it is still to be heard in parts of Donegal and Tyrone.
Stoker has this: "He was so much mulvathered at the shnake presumin' to stay that, after he tould thim all to go, that for a while he didn't think it quare that he could shpake at all." Samuel Lover has the word in Legends and Stories OX Ireland (1884): "For it was only mulvatherin people they were. He also used the word in the sense confused with drink, and he suggests that the word also means to act the gom.
Andrew Bell, who lives in the Lagan, not far from Strabane, wants to know the origin of the word hurdies, the buttocks.
It seems to be confined to the north and is undoubtedly Scottish in origin. Many northern writers were fond of it: MacGill, Peadar O'Donnell and Seumus MacManus among them.
Simmons has it in his glossary of south Donegal English (1890). Burns has: "His Gawcie tail wi' upward curl, Hung owre his hurdies wi' a swirl" in T'a Dogs. "How cou'd ye ca' my hurdies fat," asked a lesser poet, Ramsay, in 1724.
The EDD has hurdy caikle, a pain in the loins commonly felt by reapers, and occasioned by stooping". The word was in Scots as far back as 1535, when the estimable Lyndesay wrote: "Of her hurdies scho had na hauld." Figure that one out.
I don't know what the young Master Brian Byrne of Raheny was up to in his youth when his long suffering mother used to shout I declare to God I'll cut lethericks off o' your backside when I'll catch you".
I've heard this word in south Dublin and in north Wicklow. It is. I feel sure, related to the EnglishNorth Country word, a slice, a rasher of bacon. Origin? I don't know.