The Words We Use

It must be 40 years since I was first taken to the Auld Lammas Fair in Ballycastle

It must be 40 years since I was first taken to the Auld Lammas Fair in Ballycastle. I was reminded of the day when I got a letter recently from S Sproule, who lives in that hospitable town, asking for any information I might have gleaned in my travels about a word still used at the great fair - bunce. A bunce, my correspondent tells me, is a small commission given to a man who helps negotiate when a deal seems to be on the verge of collapse. The word was new to me, but both the English Dialect Dictionary and Macafee's Concise Ulster Dictionary have it; they connect it to the flax business. W. H. Patterson's glossary of Antrim and Down words (1880) has: "A consideration in the way of commission given to persons who bring together buyer and seller at a flax market." The word is also found in Scotland. When boys at the Edinburgh High School find anything, the boy who crises "bunce!", has a claim to half of it. The London version was bunts, and it means profit. Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) has, with reference to haggling done by street urchins, "All over that amount being the boys' profit or bunts."

Bunce is also an Ulster verb. It means to share money. "He would not bunce with me", and "bunce the money", have been recorded in Antrim, Macafee has "bunce up", meaning, pool your resources for a present, a meal out, etc.

But where did the word originate? Nobody knows, and it is regarded as slang. It is possibly a form of bonus. Some have compared the Danish bundt and the Swedish bunt, words adapted from the German bund, a bundle.

Down in Graiguenamanagh recently I met a man of the Connors clan of Travellers who described a pony he was leading as a real little fricker. I must ask my friend, Linda McGrane, who teaches the Travelling women of Wicklow to read, and who is recovering from an operation in Beaumont Hospital, has she heard this one. Just to be sure that I heard the word properly, I asked Mr C to repeat the word. "A fricker, boss", he said, "a lively little divil". I looked up the word when I got home. This little treasure of a word is found all over southern England, and it has a pedigree longer than my friend's pony. It is from Old English frician, to move briskly, to dance.