An old hill farmer from west Cork once described Dolly Parton to me as a little ark of a woman. I know I'm wronging the man, and the Irish language, by spelling the word as ark instead of earc; the practice of composing quasi-phonetic anglicised spellings for Irish words is a contentious one and I won't go into the rights or wrongs of it here.
I doubt if Ms Parton would be very pleased to be compared to a newt; neither am I sure that she would forgive the Gweedoreman who called her a doory wee lass in my presence not long ago. Doory means very small. I am reliably informed that Ms P is indeed diminutive when viewed from the rear, but the word's origin might annoy her.
Doory is the same word as Middle English dwery. In a poem from about 1440 we find: "Now as a crepil lowe coorbed doun, Now a duery and now a champioun". Dwery is an an inflected form from Old English dweorh, a dwarf.
Roisin Kelleher is a charming woman who works for the BBC in Belfast. She sent me the word ganch, which she says is a silly person. Ganch, also found as gansh, gaunch, gunsh, is also a verb meaning to stutter; to talk in a halting, agitated way, according to the excellent Ulster Dialect Dictionary. It also means to talk stupidly; to bite, snap. As a noun, ganch also means a stammer; a snap; a loudmouth; an inarticulate person. But as to the origin of the word, all we know for certain is that it's a Scots import, and probably onomatopoeic.
The UDD doesn't have the verb fleg as R N. Watson of Dunmore, Co Antrim has it. "My mother used to say, `Oh, fleg off wi' ye' when she wanted us out from under her feet. I am quite certain that it was not a vulgarism, but please can you throw any light on the word's origin?"
The Scottish dialect dictionaries have this fleg. One glosses it as "to flutter, to flit from place to place". I can quote you R.L. Stevenson's Catriona, which has: "The Solan, understood about knives . . . he gled ae squawk and flegged off". But as to the word's origin, ne'er a one of the dictionaries I have hazards a guess. If I may be so bold, I think it's from Old English flegan, the same as Old High German (ar-) flaugan, to put to flight.