Frippery is a word I heard recently during a visit to Kilkenny city. A common enough word, you'll tell me, which means cheap, showy clothes, ornaments etc. It can also mean a showing off, a foolish display, pretended refinement.
But the frippery I heard spoken of in Kilkenny was a shop which sells old clothes.
"What frippery did she find that dress in, I wonder?" was the remark used by a catty lady in a coffee shop as she eyed a departing acquaintance.
The word brought me back a good many years to the New Ross of my youth, when frippers set up their stalls in the Irishtown on fair days to sell clothes to the Secondhand Roses of the town, and there were many of them in those hard times.
I hadn't heard fripper, or the Kilkenny lady's frippery, in half a century. The word comes from Old French freperie, from frepe, a rag. Further back than that it would be dangerous to venture, although the late Latin faluppa, a rag, may well be a cousin.
But the really interesting thing is that the word meant the same to the Kilkenny woman as it did to the Tudor and Jacobean dramatists. A look at the glossaries revealed that Massinger, in City Madam, has:
"Here he comes, sweating all over, he shows like a walking frippery".
And Shakespeare wrote: "we know what belongs to a frippery" in The Tempest.
Anne Byrne, from Arklow, wrote to ask where the word doxy comes from. This uncomplimentary word, a favourite of Shakespeare's, was glossed by that old reprobate, John Dunton, in his Ladies' Dictionary of 1694: "Doxies are neither wives, maids, nor widows: they will for good victuals, or for a very small piece of money, prostitute their bodies." The Wicklow doxy is not a prostitute, Anne tells me, just somebody a little weak in the carnalities, as Sean O Faolain put it. The pretty word is a diminutive from duck.
The heir in heirloom comes, through Old French heir, from the Latin heres. It is cognate with the Greek kheros, bereaved, and reminds us that in law nobody has an heir until he's dead. Loom, the word used in weaving, is from Old English geloma, which meant any tool or instrument. Therefore, the first meaning of heirloom is a tool of the family trade handed down from father to son. Margaret Butler, from Carlow, was inquiring.