The Words We Use

An acquaintance of mine, a Donegal woman, was talking about a certain politician. He was, she said, a wulla sort of man

An acquaintance of mine, a Donegal woman, was talking about a certain politician. He was, she said, a wulla sort of man. Michael Trainor, in The English Dialect of Donegal, published in the 1950s, spelled the word wullach, and defined a wullach man as "excitable, inclined to extremes of moods". As to where the word came from: in Scotland they have wallach: a noisy, blustering, demonstrative person. They also use the word as a verb: to wail, to scream, to cry as a child out of humour does. It may have come to Donegal from Scots, but it is Gaelic in origin. Consider wallach, vain, proud. Dinneen, always keen to use what he perceived as the weakness of the female sex to explain his adjectives, has "ruidin uallach - a flighty little creature". This Irish and Scots-Gaelic word is from waill, pomp, vanity, vainglory, from Old Irish uall.

Helen McGinley, who wrote to me from Rathmines, doesn't say where she hails from, but I can guess. She asked first about traikle, a lazy person. Well, traikle is from traik, which has many shades of meaning. To traik means to walk about, to loaf, to stroll, to wander, to stray, to get lost. "He's none of your birds that traik" is a Donegal expression meaning that he won't be seen to do anything unconventional.

To traik also means to walk slowly, with difficulty; as a noun it means a long, tiresome walk. From this they got traikin, to be unwell, and in the bad old days to be traiked meant to have contracted tuberculosis. As to origin, more than one word may be involved here, as the Ulster Dialect Dictionary observes. Consider the Norwegian dialectal traka, to labour at some difficult task, and the Dutch trekken, to travel, origin of trek, too, of course.

I've heard silly used as Helen has it. It means pliable, limp, poor in health, helpless. A fishing-rod could be said to be silly, or sallies used in weaving baskets. Not long ago I heard a Donegal chef shout from his kitchen that the lettuce had gone silly. A tablecloth could be silly from the want of starch. Sir Walter Scott has "Your health seems but silly" in The Heart of Midlothian. Oxford says that from c.1550 to c.1675 silly was used extensively in the above senses. It's a later form of Middle English syly, defenceless, weak, pitiable, and long may it survive between Gweebarra and Churchill.