"Her shins were dotted over with fire blisters, black, red and blue on each heel a kibe." So wrote Carleton in his Traits and Stories. Kibe, as far as I know, is not found in the south of Ireland. It means a chilblain, a crack in the skin, as the man who sent me the word, Mr Jack Smith, of Monaghan, well knows: he is interested in the word's origin.
In the Ballymena Observer (1892), we are told that "those suffering from kibes get rid of them by going at night to someone's door and knocking. When anyone asks `Who's there?' the person who knocked runs away calling `Kibey heels, take that'. Then the kibes are expected to leave the person who had the disease and pass to the one who called `Who's there'?"
Mr Smith may be interested to know that the word is not confined to the north of Ireland. It is also found in east Anglia, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, as well as Wales, where it came from in the first place. Master Shakespeare used the word in Hamlet: "The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe." The word is from Welsh cibi.
Mr Jim Sutton, an old school friend from New Ross, asks about the verb to milder, to rain heavily.
This was originally a milling term: the milder was the quantity of corn ground at one time. Figuratively, milder (in some places melder) came to mean a great flow, a large quantity, a deluge. It's from the Old Norse meldr, flour or corn in a mill.
From Ms Janet Hall, of Naas, comes a query about the word healer, a horse's cover or rug. The verb heal means to hide, to keep secret. A healer is one who hides or conceals anything, such as loot in foreign banks; in southern England they have a saying "a healer's as bad as a stealer". To heal also means to cover up; hence Ms Hall's healer. Hence too a word I heard many years ago from Mr Bill Blake, a fisherman from Kilmore Quay, healing, by which he meant a coverlet.
In the north of Ireland, to heal means to cover with a slight layer of earth; to plant cabbages in a temporary way, to keep them safe until it is convenient to plant them permanently.
All these are from the Old English helian, helan, to cover, hide, conceal.