HUSTLE is a Donegal noun, found only in that fair county, according to Michael Traynor’s The English Dialect of Donegal, published in 1953 by the Royal Irish Academy. I was reminded of it by Ann Gillespie from Fanad, now living in Santry. A hustle is what people in the Gaeltacht areas call a meitheal, a gathering of people to do a certain job. Traynor gives the gloss: “We had a hustle and rid the avenue of weeds.”
Ann Gillespie’s was one of many e-mails sent to me while Mr Mark Cahill was saving my sight in a Dublin hospital; I apologise for the delay in answering my correspondents, especially the Monaghan lady who wanted information about the word hackler, found in the song The Hackler From Grousehall, which she intended to sing at a wedding. I hope her performance went down well, even without the following information.
A hackler was a man who dressed flax or hemp with the hackle, an instrument set with parallel steel pins, whereby the fibres are split, straightened, and combed out, so as to be in condition for spinning. We find the verb to hackle in Dr Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, defined as “to dress flax”. Miss Edgeworth used the word in her Early Lessons, published in 1797: “I am going to hackle the flax . . . said the woman, and she began to comb the flax with these steel combs.” I note that the verb is also used in hairdressing. Oxford cites JS Cox’s Illustrated Dictionary of Hairdressing, published in 1961: “Hackle, to draw hair through a hackle to disentangle it.” The Irish for hackle is the sweet-sounding siostal; siostalóir is a hackler. There is a song which warns girls of marrying a siostalóir; it would, the song said, bring tears and sorrow.
Joan Hartley from Wexford asks how old the word knack is; she thinks it is a modern Americanism. It is not. Knack is defined by Oxford as “a trick; a device, artifice; formerly often, a deceitful or crafty device, a mean or underhand trick; later esp. an adroit or ingenious method of doing something, a clever expedient, a ‘dodge’.” Chaucer used the word in Dethe Blaunche, c.1369, and Wyclif, around 1380, was warning against “coueitous laweieris with their gnackis iapis”. The ultimate origin of the word is unknown. Oxford says that it agrees in age and forms with Middle English knack, meaning a sharp-sounding blow, of echoic origin and related to Norwegian knak and Irish cnag; but where in God’s name is the sense connection here?