Down at Tom Munnelly's festival of traditional singing in Ennistymon recently, I heard a man from Co Antrim referring to a small boy who crash-landed on to a table while giving an imitation of an out-of-control airplane, as a spreet. In Scotland a spreet is a mischievous young person, while in Ulster the word is not confined to humans: around Ballymena you may hear them speak of a spreet of a hen or calling a Jack Russell a spreet of a dog. This spreet is a variant of sprite, itself from Old French esprit, spirit, from Latin spiritus.
A relative of mine who lives in Cornwall tells me that spreet is a verb both there and in neighbouring Devon. It means to haunt a person after death. One of my dialect dictionaries quotes an oul' wan from Penzance frightening children: `I'll come back when I'm dead an' spreet ee'. Hence their word spreety, ghostly. To spreet also means to wander about. The English Dialect Dictionary quotes a Cornish landlady laying down the law to a guest: `I don't like people staying with me spreeting from room to room before I'm up'.
Mary Darcy from Walkinstown asks if there is a connection between hobby-horse, which to her means both a rocking horse and an obsession, and hobby, a favourite pastime.
There is. First of all, a hobby is a small, tough horse. It became a child's name for a horse, and afterwards, as hobby-horse, became it's name for a toy horse. Both hobby and hobby-horse became offensive terms, `said of a woman who romps with men', as EDD puts it: and figuratively a hobby came to mean an object of ridicule. To make a hobby of oneself means to behave in a foolish manner in both south Tipperary and Yorkshire.
And here's a bit of folklore from Cornwall, courtesy of above-mentioned relative. In Padstow on May Day a hobby-horse was carried through the streets to a pool a mile out of town. The head was dropped into the pool, and the water sprinkled on the spectators. The procession used to return home singing a song to commemorate the tradition that the French, who landed in the bay, mistook a party of mummers in red cloaks for soldiers, and fled to their boats.
Hobby is a native English pet-name for a horse. It is a variant of Robbie, or Robin, and given as a name to cart-horses as far back as 1509.