I was reminded the other night of two good words associated with horses. A few of us were discussing the Cheltenham festival and one wise man shook his head when I told him I was going to invest a small sum on a certain animal bred by a friend of mine from Co Wexford.
He had heard, he said, that the horse was off recently, the result of a tender frush. The frush is also commonly called the frog. The word is common in northern English dialects and has been bothering lexicographers for a long time. Some dictionaries say the word is related to the Scots and northern English adjective frush, brittle. Not so; that word was not recorded before the 19th century.
An old writer on equine matters, Edward Topsell, who flourished in Shakespeare's time, may have the answer for us.
In The Historie of Four-footed Beastes, he wrote: "The frush is the tenderest part of the hoof towards the heel, and because it is fashioned like a forked head the French men call it Furchet to, which word our farriers, perhaps for easiness sake of pronunciation do make it a mono syllable and pronounce it frush.' The other word that came to mind is fell, a noun I heard from a Wexford Traveller who deals in horses. "He's worth the price of his fell and no more," he said. Fell is skin. It's found to this day in Scotland, and in northern and midland English. It's from Middle English felle; from Old English fel, skin.
"They come in here every Friday to chitter," complained an old malt-worm in a Dungarvan hostelry to me recently. He was complaining about four women who disturb his peace on their way home from playing golf.
Chitter is a parallel form of chatter, used commonly of bird song. Joyce used it of running water in Finnegans Wake: "Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of."
The word is common along the east coast. It is also found in Scotland, the north of England, in Devon and Cornwall. Chaucer in The Miller's Tale has: "Of hir song, it was so lowd and yerne As eny swelwe chittering on a berse."
Chitter has another meaning. Joan Trimble once told me that in rural Fermanagh, to chitter meant to shiver with cold. I heard it in Donegal, at the back of Errigal. John Skelton knew it back in 1526: `Se for God avowe, for cold as I chydder'.