A man who hails from near the town of Banbridge gave me a few interesting words recently. He came down our way to play golf one summer and decided to stay. He loves Co Down but, as he put it, "I'm not dwining for it, nor am I likely to fall in a dwaum thinking about it."
Dwining,to decline in health, is found also in Antrim and in east Donegal. It is also found in Scotland and Northern England, in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and in East Anglia. It survives from Old English dwinan, to waste away; there is also Old Norse duina. It came to the North from Scotland; in The Brde of Lammermoor Sir Walter Scott has: "Being up early and down late with his dwining daughter."
My friend's dwaum means a swoon, a fit of weakness. It is in Scots as dwam, and is also found as such in Northern England, in East Anglia, and in Devon and Cornwall. The word has been recorded in Simmons's south Donegal glossary of 1890, and by W.H. Patterson in his glossary of Down and Antrim words, written in 1880. It is of Teutonic origin. There is the Old Saxon dwaim, delusion, and the Old English dwolma, chaos.
To barge, to abuse verbally, to scold, is a dialect word found all over Ireland, Scotland and England. John Harte heard it in Clonmel recently; he wants to know something of its origin. `An' the girl kep bargein' an' bangin him with the beesom', said the author of a A Fenian Night's Entertainment of a hard-pressed Wexfordman in the late nineteenth century. O'Casey has, `She was bargin out of her', in The Plough and the Stars; and Synge has `After a prolonged barging he got a glass of whiskey', in The Shanachie. Tentatively, it may be a back formation from barge, noting that the bargees were noted for using crude language. B'fheidir e. The word doesn't appear in literature before the nineteenth century.
"Young ones don't mind being seen in any class of oul' baffity nowadays", a Kilkenny woman was heard to say recently by Mary Gladney of Carlow, who asks what baffity is. It is a cheap, generally cotton, fabric, originally of oriental manufacture. Seamus Moylan, in The Language of Kilkenny has "She'd take a lot of baffity for a shift", used of a large lady. As to origin, it is probably from the Persian baft, wove.