A few more Donegal words from the works of Harry Percival Swan were collected and sent to me by Aidan O'Hara. The first is the verb mismorrow. "Don't mismorrow the papers", don't mix them up.
Mismorrow, more often found as mismarrow, is native to Scotland, Cumbria and Northumberland. The dialect poet Wallace from Dumfries has this in The Schoolmaster, written in 1899: "O we're a' mismarrowed thegither, / O we're a' misfitted and wrang." Mismorrow is also a noun, one of a pair that does not correspond, anything that is wrongly matched; a black in a team of bay horses, for example.
Marrow, noun and verb, from which mismorrow comes, is also well-known in the north of Ireland and Scotland, and in England south of the Scottish border to Chester. The noun means a match, equal; an exact counterpart or likeness, a facsimile. "Mysell for speed had not my marrow", boasted the great Hogg, while John Clare, the Northumberland poet had "a mon wha's marrow's hard to meet". Marrow can also mean a companion, mate, partner; hence marrowless, companionless, solitary, unmarried. A children's rhyme from Cheshire goes: "The robin and the wren / Are God's cock and hen, / The martin and the swallow / Are God's mate and marrow."
As a verb, marrow is defined in WH Patterson's Glossary of Antrim and Down words (1880) as "to lend men or horses to a neighbour and to receive a similar loan in return when needed". In Scotland to marrow means to wed. An Ayrshire minister of yesteryear was quoted as saying, "Charlie and Belle are a couple marrowed by their Maker."
Wersh cooking means insipid fare. I've also heard this adjective, wersh, used figuratively in Donegal, just as a Scott used it in Old Mortality: "The Worcester man was but wersh parritch; neither gede to fry, boil nor sup cauld." Simmons in his south Donegal glossary, compiled in 1890, defined wersh as weak, delicate, lacking in stamina. Palsgrave's dictionary of 1530 has, "Werysshe as meat is that is nat well taysye". The word is probably a contracted form of wearish, an obsolete, (I think) form of late Middle English werische, of obscure origin.
Swan glossed crack as conversation. The word is, as Terry Dolan pointed out in his Dictionary of Hiberno English, from Middle English crak, loud conversation. Spenser has "vainglorious crakes" in the Fairie Queene; he meant braggarts.
Finally, a word I heard in Dunlewey at the foot of the Errigal, for a see-saw, and one I had forgotten: shuggly-shoe. Nach deas e?