Not far from the town of Dungarvan I recently heard a strange word which I jotted down as lunjous. An old man of my acquaintance used it to describe a bad-tempered, quarrelsome, vindictive person. I had never previously heard the word in Ireland, but Wright's great English Dialect Dictionary has lungeous, lungus, lunjus and lunjies from various places north of Warwickshire, and from a few places in the southern shires. It adds "awkward, clumsy, unmannerly, rough, violent in play" to the meanings given above. It is also used as an intensive in places: "It's lungeous cohd this mornin' wi' this here black east wind" was recorded in Lincolnshire.
Wright doesn't attempt a guess at an etymology, but if I'm correct, the word has an extraordinary origin. I think it's a variant of a word found in the literature of the Tudors, lungis, sometimes lungeis. Lyly in Euphues (1579) has: "If tall (they term him) a luigeis, if short, a dwarf." Lungis to both Lyly and to Beaumont and Fletcher was an long, clumsy galoot. The Citizen's Wife in The Knight of the Burning Pestle aments over Ralph the Apprentice after one of his attempts at how's your father: "O, husband, here's Ralph again! - Stay, Ralph, again, let me speak with thee. How dost thou, Ralph? Art thou not shrewdly hurt? The foul great lungies laid unmercifully on thee: there's some sugar-candy for thee. Proceed; thou shalt have another bout with him."
Lungis, if Oxford is correct, is by way of Old French longis from Longinus, the apocryphal name of the Roman centurion who thrust his spear into Our Lord's side; by popular etymology associated with the Latin longus, long. The Waterford man's lunjous is surely the Tudor lungis, and if so it has the blessing of our greatest dictionary. A most interesting survival it is.
Another good word for a lout, usually one of no fixed abode, and no visible means of support, is the Ulster gangrel, sent to me by Anne Gallagher from Letterkenny. An old word this. Hampole speak of "gangrels and langelers" in his Perfect Living (1340); Burns, in Jolly Beggars, has 'a merry core o' randie, gangrel bodies." It's thought to be from gang on some obscure analogy, according to the Oxford dictionary; the ending occurs, though perhaps from diverse sources, in several depreciative terms, as haverel, mongrel, wastrel. Gang, a set of things or persons, is Teutonic in origin. For example the German gang applied to set of things - of cartwheels, horseshoes, etc.