J. O'Flaherty of Galway wrote about the expression used in Munster Irish, ag ol tobac - drinking tobacco. Could it possibly be a borrowing? he asks.
Yes, the Jacobeans drank their tobacco. Hawkins the sailor, writing in 1622 in Voyage to the South Sea, explains: `With drinking of tobacco it is said that the Roebucke was burned in the range of Dartmouth'. The verb drink is from Old English drincan and has cognates in Old Norse drekka and Old Saxon drinkan. Hawkins and his contemporaries considered smoking as a pouring of tobacco down the throat, and hence their use of the verb to drink.
Hawkins was a swashbuckler of note, a word with a great sound to it. Margaret O'Brien of Corbally, Limerick, would like to know whether a swashbuckler is man who swashes buckles or one who buckles swashes.
Bucca was the Latin for a cheek, especially a cheek puffed out with food or with breath (the French borrowed the word as bouche, a mouth). Bucca had a diminutive, buccula, which in Late Latin came to mean a rounded projection or boss. This buccula gave us buckle, and also buckler, a round shield protected with a boss. Swash is imitative of the sound swords made when swishing through the air: and swashbuckler, therefore, is a chap who, like his Irish counterpart buaileam sciath, swashes at his enemy's shield, with the implication that he does little damage but makes an awful lot of noise. Swashbuckler dates from the 17th century. In 1560 a longforgotten writer called Pilkington wrote: "To be a dronkarde, a gamner. A swashe-buckeler, he hath not alowed thee one mite."
J. Power of Ferrybank, Waterford, is a man who enjoys the antics of the Spice Girls.
Back we go to the Latin antiquus, ancient, from which English borrowed antique. But the same word went into Italian as antico, which was the name given to one of the ancient subterranean Roman workings. From there it was transferred to the grotesque carvings on its walls, and so came to mean simply "grotesque". This is the meaning it has in Italian Renaissance literature, and so it was borrowed as antic by the Elizabethans. Hamlet's "antic disposition" shows a stage in the transition to the sense "grotesque behaviour". From there it is just a hop to the Spice Girls' considerably more sexy antics.