Words we use

'Once upon a time, and a long time ago it was, I knew a chap from Co Clare whose name, may God forgive his parents, was Hyacinth," wrote an anonymous correspondent whose letter had a Limerick postmark.

"For a girl, fair enough," went on my correspondent, "but for a man! The poor devil vowed to change his name by deed poll as soon as he could raise the wind."

I cannot remember what native Irish name was replaced by Hyacinth by the National schoolmasters and their clerical masters in the 19th century, to comply with Department of Education regulations. Diarmaid became Jeremiah in Cork, for example, and Finín and Fionán, boys' names, became Florence in the same county.

I must point out to my correspondent that Hyacinth was originally a boy's name. He was a Spartan, the son of a king, and he was so beautiful that the god Apollo fell in love with him. The trouble was that the god of the west wind, Zephyrus, also fell for this handsome Hyacinthus. Zephyrus was insanely jealous, and one day, as the boy and Apollo were playing quoits, Zephyrus caused the heavy disc thrown by Apollo to veer from its course and clobber the young fellow on the head. He died on the spot.

In his memory, the grief-stricken Apollo caused a flower to grow from the earth where the boy had died, forever afterwards called hyacinth in his memory.

A yachtswoman from Howth, who doesn't want her name mentioned, asks if I can throw any light on the word spinnaker. The jury is out on this one; but most agree that it came about because sailors on an English racing yacht, bemused at a new sail she was carrying, named the sail after the yacht Sphinx. The Yachting Calendar and Review of 1866 first described the new sail as: "A kind of large balloon jib extending from the topmast head to the deck, and before the wind a most powerful drawing sail."

That doesn't explain why it was called a spinnaker. Well, the folklore of the sea has it that the sailors, too thick to pronounce Sphinx, made Spinnicks of it, and made up spinnaker for the quare new sail. Would you swallow that? For the want of any better explanation, indeed for the want of any other explanation, the major dictionaries tend to go along with it.

A major tragedy has befallen me; I have lost my address book. Would wordsman Robin Sinclair, for one, please contact me again.