It would embarrass me to tell you how long ago Dermot Treacy of Strandhill Road, Sligo wrote to me about a word remembered from his boyhood in Kilmallock, Co Limerick - spock, a word a friend of mine also heard as smock in Bruree. Mr Treacy writes: "During the war it was hard, and expensive, to get a hurley. We used to play on the main Kilmallock to Kilfinnane Road with improvised hurleys which we called spocks. I haven't been able to find the word in any Irish dictionary."
Can anybody help with this word? I have no idea where it originated.
I can do better with putalogue for Anne Walsh of Ballygunner in Waterford. She tells me that it means a plump woman or a plump boy where she was raised, out Mullinavat direction. She has never heard a fat man called a putalogue; there's a cuddly something about the word, she feels.
Putalog is the Irish, and it's onomatopoeic. The late R.B. Walsh of UCD and Slieverue, Co Kilkenny gave me the word. He heard it in west Waterford. Diarmaid O hAirt's Diolaim Deiseach glosses it as a fat chicken. They have putachaun in south Galway. There is means both a fat, lazy person and a cuddly young woman.
Grace Hart hails from Fanad in Donegal and she wants to know where an expression "take that smut of your face" comes from. Her mother would use it when one of her offspring got into a bit of a sulk about something. Smut is Irish; a sulky expression, a pout, according to Dinneen. Michael Traynor's The English Dialect of Donegal has the phrase Domhnach na Smut, "the Sunday of the frowning faces, the first Sunday in Lent, from the discontented appearance of the women who did not get a man".
The word hangnail is also bothering Grace. They call it agnail in parts of Scotland, she says.
Yes, there are many names in the dialects for this minor irritant: backfriend, stepmother's blessing, fan nail, nang nail and thang nail among them. The Old English was ang-naegl; the original meaning seems to have been a corn on the toe, a painful, compressed nuisance that must have felt like an iron nail. Ang meant compressed, tight. Compare ang in angmod, anxious, angness, anxiety. Naegl was an iron nail. Hangnail came from the popular, mistaken, association of naegl with the nail that grows on the fingers.