`He addles more in a week than you would in a month', an old woman who lived in Meenbanad, in the Rosses of Donegal, said to me once. The word surfaced again last week in a letter sent to me by a retired teacher from Dunfanaghy direction who doesn't want to be named.
Addle is found in England's northern counties and is quite common in various places in the north of this island, which is a little strange at first glance, as the word is not known in Scotland, according to the English Dialect Dictionary.
To addle means to earn. There is a riddle from Lincolnshire, quoted in Notes and Queries in 1865, which runs, "Grows in the wood, an' yowls l' the town, An' addles its master many a crown. Answer - a fiddle." My Dunfanaghy correspondent has also heard the noun addlings, though not of late. Addlings were a woman's earnings; money got by selling the odd dozen of eggs or by knitting for the factories or shops.
If the word is not from Scots and is not from Irish or Scots Gaelic either, the chances are it is of Norse origin; and sure enough there's the Old Norse oethla, to acquire property; and oethal, property.
If the men who took part in the War of Independence were said to be "out", Seamus O Saothrai from Greystones reminds me that those who got caught up in the 1798 Hurry were said to be up. The term was used in Leinster as well as in the North, and Madden, in his Literary Remains of the United Irishmen, recalls a song called Up. All nature is up, the author claims, and so, "The progress of this rising rage, No human power can stop; Then tyrants cease vain war to wage, All nature will be UP."
Why up? Influenced by the verb to rise, I suppose.
Curthere was the Forth, Co Wexford, word for season (Norman French quarter, Old French quatier). Seamus Heaney told me the other night of an inspector who visited a school in Tyrone's Sperrin mountains during what the Forthmen and the bargymen used to call Arragh Curthere (Irish Earrach, Spring). "Name the four seasons, boy", says your man to a wee scudler who was knee high to a wether. "Well, sir", he answered after thinking on it "there's the lambin, and the clippin, and the dippin . . . and then the tippin". Full cycle.
Perfection.