I heard a very old word used by a wildfowler by the banks of the Slaney recently. He spoke of stales, decoys or lures used to attract birds. I have read that the word comes from Old English stalu, a theft, or stelan to steal, but Oxford disagrees.

It is, in all probability, from Anglo-French estale, applied to a pigeon used to entice a hawk into a net. The word is of Teutonic origin, it is thought. Compare the Old English stμlhrβn, decoy reindeer, and the Northumbrian stμllo, catching of fish. Think, too, of the German stellvogel, decoy-bird.

So much for the etymology.

The word has been used a lot in English literature ever since it first appeared in the famous glossary Promptorium Parvulorum Sive Clericorum about 1440: "Stale: of fowlynge or byrdys takynge, stacionaria."

The Tudors were very familiar with it. Beaumont and Fletcher have it in The Humorous Lieutenant: "stales to catch kites". Sydney has it in Arcadia: "But rather one bird caught served as a stale to bring in more." Shakespeare used the word in both The Taming of the Shrew and in The Tempest, where he has: "The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither, / For stale to catch those thieves." It is good to know that it still survives in Ireland. It is common in rural England, I am told.

My friend Miley Connors, a traveller of Wexford origin who used to deal in horses in his young days, used a very interesting old word in my presence not long ago. He pronounced it snape, but is more often written as sneap. It means, he told me, to snub.

He has been sneaped quite a bit in his time, old Miley. The word also has the meaning to pinch, to bite, to chill, benumb, starve, in the dialects of England, including Shakespeare's Warwickshire one. In A Winter's Tale the great man has: "That may blow / No sneaping winds at home, to make us say, / This is put forth too truly." In The Rape of Lucrece we find the lovely passage: "Like little frosts that sometimes threat the spring, / To add a more rejoicing to the prime, / And give the sneaped birds more cause to sing."

I don't think Miley Connors has ever seen a cabaret, the subject of a note from Mary O'Herlihy from Monkstown, Cork. French, of course, of unknown origin, its original meaning was a booth, shed. That is related to Latin taberna is doubtful.