A word of apology to some people who wrote recently. Your letters and my replies to them were stolen from a file I had foolishly left in my car: the only one of them I can remember came from a Mr O'Neill in Belfast, who edits a Percy French newsletter; he wanted to know the origin of jarvey.
Collins, believe it or not, says that the word is obsolete; as any Irishman could have told them it is no such thing. The word's origin is in the personal name Jervis, or Jarvis. So who was this gentleman? He was English, and Sergeant Ballantine's Experiences of 1882 explains that the driver of a hackney coach was called a jarvey "as a compliment paid to the class in consequences of one of them being hanged".
I wonder was this the "T. Jarvis, a hackney coachman" mentioned in Grose's 1796 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue? The 1818 Flash Dictionary mentions Jervice's upper benjamin, a coachman's great coat. It appears that jarvey has disappeared from the English of England, which accounts, no doubt, for Collins's claim that it is obsolete.
This morning's post brought a letter from Mrs Ann Murphy of Swords asking about the word fadaise, used by the writer's grandfather, who fought in the Great War and had a lot of barrack-room slang; Mrs Murphy wonders if this word could be so described.
It is French, but it is not slang; it means a flat, stupid remark, nonsense, twaddle.
I have never heard the word in Ireland, but a friend of mine heard fwadaysh for nonsensical talk, raimeis, around the Galway/ Clare border. He assumed it was Irish, something like faideis, a word unattested to, I'm afraid. How it got here from France I have no idea, but I'm glad to know it lives outside the west.
I heard the word fubsy in Greystones recently. A very English word this, but used by a Killincarrick woman of the old stock. It means stout, portly. Fobby is a variant. Sir Thomas More has: "Glotony maketh the body fat and fobby". My friend told me that fubsy is not used to describe a woman; neither is it a term of derision.
The Scottish lexicographer Ivor Brown wrote that fubsy should not be used of men of Falstaffian appearance.
The man who larded the lean earth as he walked along outranged the term altogether. Fubsy was for small, plump men but not for adiposity's masterpiece.