An honest Ulsterman came around here in a van the other day, inquiring as to whether I had any odd jobs to be done. He looked at my garden, in which noxious weeds have been rearing their heads since the snows left us. He promised to return soon; he was too throng, he said, to start the job immediately, which leads me to believe that gardening is not his forte either. I know I'll never see him again.
I hadn't heard the adjective throng for quite a while. Used of a place it means crowded, very busy; of a person, busy, fully occupied. The Concise Ulster Dictionary has it, needless to say; so has Bernard Share in Slanguage, and he quotes the Donegal man, Seamus MacManus, in The Rocky Road to Dublin (1938): "Because Billy had no help footering with his farm and wrestling with cattle, he had been `too throng' ever to go courting." Lynn Doyle, another northerner, has this in Ballygullion (1908): "And the market day bein' a throng day for the polis in Ballygullion, it was ginerally Billy's throng day outside av it, delivering a wee keg here and there."
The word is also found in Connacht. Somerville and Ross, in Some Irish Yesterdays, have "We were throng as three in a bed." Lover has "Mighty throng it wuz wid the boys and the girls" in his Legends and Stories of Ireland (1848).
The Scots form is thrang. It is from Middle English throng, thrang, probably shortened from Old English gethrang, crowd, tumult.
Jane Shaw, from Sutton, Co Dublin, asks about the slang word bimbo. It's from the Italian bimbo, which means bambino, a baby. An interesting thing about bimbo is that it started life in English, in America, as a contemptuous term for a man. It first appeared in print in 1919. P.G. Wodehouse used it in 1924, in Bill the Conqueror: "The bimbo Pyke arrived". In 1947, in Full Moon, he wrote of "Bimbos who went about the place making passes at innocent girls after discarding their wives." A female bimbo first appeared in print in 1929 in Amer- ican Speech 1V. It soon became popular in crime fiction, its first outing being in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1937: "We found Durken and Frenchy La Seur seated at a table with a pair of blonde bimbos." Hot stuff.
Interestingly, gentlemen, the word is related to Italian bambo, silly; the same root is found in Latin bambalio, a blockhead.