Gerry O'Keeffe, from Ellagh, Headford, Co Galway, grew up, he tells me, in Carrick-on-Suir. As a child, he used to play in a place called The Mash, a reclaimed area beside the river. There are several more mashes in and around Waterford city, and indeed up the estuaries of the Barrow/Nore.
Mash is a variant of marsh and the word is common, too, in the dialects of England. The English Dialect Dictionary describes mash as "low-lying land liable to be flooded: grasslands near the sea or river, whether dry or swampy; rich, level land". From Norfolk, a correspondent wrote: "I used to drive the sheep to the mash along with the cows." A Berkshire man wrote that a mash is "sometimes a fine meadow, as at Newbury", while from Sussex came the information that in the word mash there is no implication of bog or swamp. From the Old English merse, related to mere, a lake.
Some very interesting Westmeath words came my way recently, courtesy of Seamus O Saothrai, who lives in Greystones, Co Wicklow. One is wigs. "A slanesman (Irish slean, turf-spade) always described as wigs the undecayed or only partially decayed leaves found in `pucky' turf, i.e. sods cut from the exposed part of the top of the bog after the bank had been cleaned. "Wigs were the source of much annoyance, as the blade of the slane was generally unable to cut through them. They usually had to be pulled or peeled off the blade manually, thus causing delay." And the origin of the word? A difficult one, this. There is the dialect wigs, tuberous plants, the tubers of which are connected by tough fibres, a word obsolete in England by 1900, according to the EDD. This gave wiggy, having thickly-growing or matted fibrous roots. My friend Mr O Saothrai tentatively suggests the Irish fiag, a rush. Perhaps his is the correct answer.
J. O'Reilly, of Cavan, wants to know where the word scamool comes from. Once upon a time, he tells me, he often heard the word used by young men in describing young women. A scamool girl was good-looking. This is from the Irish sceimhiuil, handsome. Sca mool is still used in Leitrim.
Many's the man made a glake of himself chasing scamool women. Joan Power, of Kilkenny, wants to know where glake, an eejit, comes from. Well, there's the Irish gleic, pronounced glake, a fool, no doubt related to Scots and Ulster Scots glaik, a contemptuous epithet of obscure origin applied to a person.