I heard an interesting word the other day from a Kentish plumber who is travelling around Wicklow in a van laden with all the tools of trade. For a fraction of what it would cost were I to employ local labour, this journeyman, apart from doing a plumbing job, also replaced gutters and roof-timbers for me; he described warped timber as snying.
The word is in Oxford, which quotes a book on ship's carpentry, written in 1711 by an old salt called Sunderland: `As much as possible keep your work from extream Snying or cambering'. The book defines snying as "an arching upwards, where the Middle of the Plank appears higher than the Ends." Sunderland also has sny: "In working up a round Buttock of a ship the lower Edge of the planks will have a sudden Sny."
Coming from long line of ship's carpenters on my mother's side, I am glad to know this word. Oxford does not suggest an origin. I wonder would they consider the Old Norse snua, defined by Vigfusson's dictionary as "to change, alter"; also, "to turn, twist".
The word odd is the subject of a query from Thomas O'Brien from Waterford. Somebody can be odd, peculiar, he notes; a liar may tell his doctor that he only has the odd pint. Why these different meanings?
Odd, in all its meanings, comes from Old Norse oddi, a point, a triangle. Oddi developed the meaning odd, as opposed to even, number, because the apex of a triangle is the unpaired angle, and an odd number is a sum of pairs and one unpaired unit, Webster says. Whence such compounds as odda-mathr, the third man, who gives the casting vote, and odda-tala, odd number.
From these it was only a hop and a skip to considering odd as relating to anything different or singular.
Scamper is bothering Mary Ross from Douglas, in Cork. Is it thieves' cant, she asks?; and is it a variant of scarper? Scamper didn't attain the status of a standard word until comparatively recently; indeed it didn't appear in print until 1697, in the preface to Vanbrugh's Aesop.
It is from obsolete Dutch schampen, to flee, from Middle French escamper, to decamp, from Italian scampare, to flee, to decamp. The Italian word is from an assumed Vulgar Latin word excampare, to decamp, from Latin ex, out of, plus campus, field. Scarper is slang, from Italian scappare, to escape, reinforced after the Great War by Scapa Flow, Cockney slang for "go".