A phrase commonly used throughout this land is "he was going, or doing, his dinger". Mary Jones from Artane asks about it, and she glosses it as "he was going berserk, or at least he had lost his cool". Fair enough. Others might say, "he was going at a dangerous speed": an Armagh woman who lives in my neck of the woods gave me that gloss.
I've heard it said of a visiting motorcyclist who seemed to think that the lanes of Wicklow are T.T. courses. "He was going his dinger; he cleared the ditch and ended up in the next parish," said a friend of mine with certain amount of glee, when he heard that your man had a minor mishap. The phrase seems to have a few shades of meaning, but as to dinger's origin, it is not, as Ms Jones thinks, slang. Indeed it had quite a pedigree. It came here with the boys in the longships: it is from the Old Norse dengja, to hammer.
You and I might hide something; in parts of the North they would feal it. I heard the word in Donegal. Hens, for instance, might feal their eggs in a hayshed. I'm sure the word is found elsewhere in the north, and I'd like to know exactly where. You'll find the words in northern and midland dialects across the water and it has been in literature since 1325, when one of the Metrical Homilies has: "For his [Christ's] Godhed in fleis was felid." The word is from the Old Norse fela, to hide. Nuala Conagha, a woman from the parish of Gweedore, now living in London, asked me about it.
A Cavan man, James Maguire, wrote to ask about the origin of the verb to board, meaning to accost somebody, often with the intention of asking for money, the price of a drink, or a subscription to some cause or other. W.H. Patterson in his Glossary of Antrim and Down words (1880) has this verb. Perhaps it's confined to the northern counties: I don't know. It's common in the dialects of England, particularly those of the maritime regions, and it comes from the verb meaning to come alongside a ship with the intention of attacking her. It's from the French border, influenced by aborder, to approach. "I will board her though she chide as loud as thunder," says Petruchio referring to Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. He wasn't being bawdy: his meaning was Mr Maguire's.