Madam, – The term “giddily”, describing Shane Horgan’s sublime try-yielding pass to Brian O’Driscoll in Leinster’s Heineken Cup victory over Brive, hit the nail on the head (“Keen to put the record straight”, Sport, January 20th).
It was a word we freely used in our youthful days in Limerick, and described something that was terrific or smashing.
Fair play to former Leinster coach David Knox for adding this lovely old expression to our rugby vocabulary. It makes a nice change from some of the modern terminology which is anything but giddily.
We cannot dispute John O’Sullivan’s conjecture that the word may be traced to Australian rugby league, but certainly our generation of the 1950s used the phrase liberally, as those who handed it down to us would also have done. – Yours, etc,