`Here's a question for you," said an old Arklow sailor to me recently. "Which would you prefer to find, and you walking the shoreline, flotsam or jetsam?" Not being particularly interested in either commodity, I guessed flotsam. It seems that I was right. Flotsam is wreckage found floating on the waves, whereas jetsam is that portion of the equipment or cargo of a ship thrown overboard to lighten it during a storm. There is a legal snag, however. Flotsam can be reclaimed by the ship's owners or insurers.
Two words with interesting pedigrees. Flotsam is from Anglo-Norman floteson; flot is compounded of Old Icelandic flot, floating, and the suffix sam, from the Icelandic samr, the equivalent of the English some, in adjectives that denote a quality or condition, such as gamesome and winsome.
Jetsam is a contracted form of jettison, the action of throwing things overboard, and that word is from Anglo-Norman getteson, Old French getaison, from Latin jactare, to throw.
Mary Ross was born within walking distance of the town of sweet Strabane and she wrote to me to ask about a word used in parts of the Laggan valley when she was young - geld. It is an adjective meaning barren, and the interesting thing about Mary's use of the word is that it relates only to female animals. A geld cow is one whose milk has dried up. Kelly's Scottish Proverbs of 1721, a book I'd like to see reprinted, has: "A geld sow was never good to grices" and was spoken to those who, having no children of their own, deal harshly with other people's. Grice is a young pig. It's from Old Norse griss. By the way, to call a pig in Kilkenny, you say griss, griss!, Seamus Moylan's splendid book, The Language of Kilkenny, tells me.
The first reference to geld, meaning barren rather than castrated, is in Cursor Mundi, about 1300: "For I Sarah am geld that is me wa." The Old Norse is geldr, barren, having no milk. Gjeld is still found in Norwegian dialect, used of a cow which for more than a year has been barren.
Finally, a man who signed his letter Old Lag asked where the slang term clink, a prison, originates. The Clink was a jail in 16th and 17th century Southwark. "He who would have been respondent must have bethought himself withal how he could refute the clink", wrote Milton in 1642.