THE WORDS WE USE

As I was saying last week when some class of a clutheracaun (a gremlin who steals things) ran off with my last paragraph, Dr James Clarke of Rathcoole sent me the word scrocky, meaning flaky. An eighty year old patient complained of having scrocky skin.

Scrocky is from the Irish scrothach, a variant of scrathach, which means flaky, according to the great 19th century scholar, John O'Donovan. The noun is scroth, or scraith, scurf.

Mrs Camilla Raab of Hogarth Hill, London, had the privilege of working with the great Eric Partridge once upon a time. Now she has honoured me by asking me about a few beauties, the first of which is slather.

She knows slather from the phrase open slather, meaning carte blanche. It is, she tells me, also used as a verb, to apply a dollop of cream or paste to a cake or to wallpaper.

As to slather in open slather, what we have here is an English North Country word meaning a downpour, or the flash flood that follows it. A Yorkshire friend of mine tells me that open slather is, literally, unhindered rain or floodwater; the figurative meaning is obvious.

Slather is also used in Yorkshire for thin, liquid mud. It may be found elsewhere in England but I haven't come across it in the dialect dictionaries that sprang up like mushrooms in the late 19th century. Confectioners and decorators use it figuratively both as a noun and as a verb.

The word is of Germanic origin, probably imitative. Compare the East Frisian sladdern, to rain noisily, to pee in the same fashion.

A trailing thread below a hemline was a tallywagger in Mrs Raab's Limerick mother's English. Tally is related to tail. Both words come from Old English taegl. The EDD has tallywag from Cheshire. There it means membrum virile.

Incidentally, I think that all the major dictionaries are wrong in their guess as to the origin of the fox hunting cry, tally ho! Perhaps from the 18th century French hunting cry taillaut, they say, every one of them. Poppycock! It's from the good English country word tally, tail, fox's brush & ho, an Old Norse exclamation used to attract attention (Shakespeare and Bertie Wooster have it in what ho!). Tally ho! is what the huntsman shouts when he first sights the fox. What would them Oxford tallywags know about huntin' anyway?