`I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw". So said Hamlet to Guildenstern, as every schoolboy and girl used to know; I mention it now because the late Charles Acton once complained to me over a jar in his and Carol's hospitable house that the usual explanation given in the major dictionaries, that handsaw is a corruption of heronshaw, simply doesn't go far enough.
Anybody who comes from Norfolk or Suffolk will know the word harnser, a heron, he said; this is what Shakespeare had in mind, although it was, of course, simply a contraction of the older heronshaw, used by Chaucer in The Squire's Tale: `I wol nat tellen . . . of hir swannes nor of hir heronsewes'. The man who couldn't tell a hawk from a hanser or a heronshaw was unable to distinguish between a hawk and its prey; even in Chaucer's time the heron was thought to be a nasty predator of game fish. God rest a man who loved the search for the origin of words almost as much as he loved music.
The word codswallop, a word used to describe nonsensical talk, is troubling Margaret Byrne of Clonskea. Is it Dublin slang, she asks? No, it's English, and got its name from a soda-water manufactured by one Hiram Codd in Camberwell, who patented the Codd bottle, whose main feature was a marble used as a stopper, in 1871. Generations of marble-playing English and Irish children (Cherry's Ale, manufactured in New Ross in my childhood, used the Codd bottles, as far as I remember) were grateful to old Hiram; is his invention still used anywhere, I wonder?
I haven't eaten ling fish in 50 years. It used to be seen hanging, stiff from salt, in fishmongers' windows when I was young. It's related to the cod, and got its name from Middle English lenge, perhaps from earlier Dutch linghe, Mary Byrne wrote to me from Carlow asking me about the word her mother had had for a sauce that accompanied this dish, sousheen. Sousheen was made by boiling milk, adding flour to thicken it, then grated onions, butter and salt. The word is also found in Kilkenny and Wexford, and in various guises: sous, sousa, soushteen, slousheen, according to Moylan's splendid lexicon, The English of Kilkenny. My Wexford granny also has sousheen. Dinneen has sabhsa, "sauce, condiment, gravy". From English. What's sauce for the goose is sousheen for the ling, you might say.