A man from Belleen, Nenagh, Oilifear O Muiri by name, is puzzled by the expression he heard in south Roscommon where he grew up: "He wasn't long hooking it out of there" - said of somebody who left in a hurry.
"To hook it" is as common in England and in Scotland as it is here. Dickens has "He have me four half bulls and ses Hook it!" in Bleak House, while up north, Scott and a host of others considered it dialect, not slang. It was an English or Scottish spailpin's expression: when a man said that he would take his hook or sling his hook or that he was going to hook it he meant that he was about to head off to a hiring fair with a scythe or a reaping hook.
Later these expressions came into slang and cant use. The EDD gives "When he saw the policeman he slung his hook", meaning he took off: Carew, in his Autobiography of a Gipsy (1897) has "When I was about fourteen I slung my 'ook and joined some travellin' Barks": by the middle of the century "to hook it", meaning simply to leave in a hurry, was common all over Britain, Ireland and America, and used by people who wouldn't know a reaping hook from a flail.
Thanks to Jimmy McGill of Claremont Road, Howth, to Pat Walsh of Ballybofey, to Kevin Bright of Goodwin"s Hill, Batterstown, Co Meath, and to Dr Sean Ua Conchubhair from Uaran Mor, Galway, for pointing out to me that my guess as to the origin of jildy (Kipling has it as juldee) was about 3,000 miles off the mark.
It comes not from Old Norse but from Hindi and was brought here by Irishmen who fought in British regiments in India. But there is this to add: my gildr and jildy come from the same ancient Indic root.
Many interesting words arrived here during Christmas. Jack Foley of Corbeigh, Cootehill, Co Cavan, tells me that a reefer in his part of the country is not what you might think. No, this was the name of a "four-swing" in a ceili dance or a set. A valued correspondent from Glenariffe tells me that a trinket is a small water channel, much smaller than a sheugh. Of French origin this.
Compare the Normandy dialect word trenque, itself from Central French trenche, now obsolete, from which trench came.