Brendan Ryan from Old Lucan Road, Palmerstown, Dublin, asks me where the phrase God's own country originated, knowing that inebriated citizens of many countries, including our own, have, in times of national celebration, put their own tag on the silly phrase.
Oxford tells me that the phrase, in a slightly shortened version, God's country, was first used nostalgically of home by northern troops fighting in the mosquitoinfested marshes of the deep south during the American Civil War. Not until the 1880s did the phrase come to mean the prairies. I once received a brochure inviting me to holiday in a place near Skibbereen, described with the diffidence the natives have been noted for since Tsarist times as "the Acupulco of the South, set in God's own country".
Monica Cleere from Kilkenny wants to know what the tee in tee-totaller comes from. The Latin word totum means "the whole". In an old gambling game in which a kind of gig or top was used, one of several marked faces of the top was marked T for totum, signifying that the player who had spun the top to land with the T facing upwards could scoop the pot. The top itself was called teetotum, and no doubt the existence of this slang word suggested teetotal as an emphatic form of total. Teetotal, it seems, was first used in the United States in the early 19th century but it gained currency in Britain and in Ireland due to the speeches of a Mr Dicky Turner of Preston, who could claim to be the Father Mathew of Lancashire. Dicky died, sober, in 1833, and the inscription on his tombstone claims that he was the first to have used the word teetotal, as applied to a person who doesn't drink, in one of the pamphlets he was fond of writing for the benefit of the Irish navvies, who didn't appreciate him one little bit.
Pamphlet - an interesting word this. Pas, plural pantes, is the Greek for "all"; philein means "to love". In the 12th century a spicy Latin love poem called Pamphilus, meaning "loved by all", was an international hit. A manuscript copy of the poem was a good deal less bulky than that of an ordinary book, and in time it became known familiarly as a pamphlet - the et being the now familiar diminutive ending. Pamphlet was soon used to describe any little book of similar size.