Dermot Quirk from Grace O'Malley Road, Howth, tells me that his mother is from Kintyre in Scotland and that she has two words that baffle him. The first is oose. It means, he says, those little balls of wool that form on woollen jumpers.
Also written ooze, Mrs Quirk's word is still common in rural Scotland. Oose was glossed in Perth in the days when ink was a dear commodity as fluffy woollen material stuffed into an inkstand to prevent the ink from spilling. But where did the word come from? It is the plural of the Scots word oo, meaning wool. What language oo, or indeed its cousin wool for that matter, ultimately came from, nobody knows for sure. There are cognate words in most of the languages of Europe and many of those of India, dead and alive. It has a relation near home in the Irish olann.
Mr Quirk's letter goes on: `the other word she uses is flourish, noun, meaning the blossom from a bush. I once brought her home some blossom from a cherry tree. She refused to have it in the house, saying that it was bad luck to bring flourish into a house.'
Yes indeed, flourish is a lovely Scots noun, common too in Ulster, and the poet Thomson (fl.1880) in his Musings wrote of `the flourish on the tree that hings'. The Scots also have the adjective flourished. The earliest reference I can find is one from The Complaynt of Scotlande (1549): `The borial blasts of the thre borouing dais of Marche had chaissit the fragrant flureis of euyrie frute tree far athourt the fieldis.'
And so to a letter from somebody who signs herself Model Girl. "Tell us," she says, "where does the word catwalk come from? Should we models use it? I mean, is it demeaning? I'm thinking of words like cat house, if you get my meaning.'
Well now, the eat in cat house is a word used in low speech since Chaucer's time. It's either from French catin, or from Dutch kat, a harlot. The cat walks you adorn, Model Girl, originated in the brick paved pathways, usually one brick or nine inches wide, laid down across the Flanders mud by British soldiers during the Great War. So call, I imagine, because only a cat could walk across them easily. I read somewhere that the models' catwalk came into slang usage as late as the seventies. Grace, Ann, is this true?