"There they were, groguin' on the sofa with the lights out." That was sent to me by a gentleman from Thurles who writes to me frequently and who signs his letters Mary Willie (Mary Willie's is a famous Tipperary pub, in case you don't know). Groguin' is what's troubling him.
Had my friend asked around the bogs of Tipperary they would have told him that a grogue is a "foot" of turf, three or four sods standing on end like a little pyramid on the turf bank to dry. It's from the Irish groig, which as a verb also means huddle. That is what my friend's couple were doing on the sofa. A more comfortable position than the one mentioned in O Donaill's dictionary by way of elucidation: "Bhi siad groigthe ar bharr an bhalla" - they were perched together on top of the wall. The great Dinneen, ever vigilant in case somebody might think that "they" were people and up to no good, would have added "as do birds". (He always used the present tense instead of the infinitive, which gave his dictionary the following beauties: "I give birth to a still-born calf", "I copulate, as of swine.")
An interesting word from the bogs of Donegal is rickle. Michael Barrett from Dunlewey gave me this one recently. The Ballymena Observer (1892) tells us that rickles are "peats put to dry with a foundation on their ends, and others built on their sides on top of the foundation. A rickle differs from a clamp in being long and narrow instead of circular." O Donaill gives the Irish as ricil, but the word's origin lies elsewhere. It's in Scots as rickle and in northern English as ruckle, and it surely has a Norse origin. There is a Norwegian dialect word rygla, which means a small loose heap, and another one, rukle, a little heap of firewood. These are also related to another Ulster word, raughle, a heap of stones; a badly built stone wall.
Burns had young Mr Barrett's word. In his Epistle to J. Lapraik he wrote: "May Boreas never thresh your rigs, Nor kick your rickles aff their legs."
My thanks to Patrick Fennessy of Gurrane, Ballyhea, Charleville, for his comments on spock, Irish spaic, an inferior hurley. Inferior the spocks might be, but that didn't stop Mr Fennessy's grandmother's uncle from being transported to Australia for cutting the makings of one in the Castleoliver Estate, near Kilfinnane. Words are indeed fossil history.