On a recent visit to Co Carlow the car I was a passenger in was stopped by a good-natured garda who inquired of my driver how in the name of the second person of the Holy Trinity could he drive with his windscreen claamed with the muck of half the county.
I was surprised to hear the word claamed, or clammed, so far south; but it has taken root in Waterford as well. I heard the verb, to clam, in the north. Last spring I heard a Donegal woman complain about her lawnmower being so easily clammed with wet grass; clogged, in other words. Clammed, or claamed, as the lawman, a native of Carlow, had it, no doubt came to Ulster by way of Scots; I notice that the word is also common in the dialects of south-eastern England, which may account for its appearance in Carlow. It's from Middle English clammen, to smear, and it has appeared more than once in literature. John Dryden has: "A chilling sweat, a damp of jealousie, Hangs on my brows, and clams upon my limbs," Amphitryon, written in 1690.
Mary Power, from Ferrybank, near Waterford, wrote to ask about the word, bandy. She has been reading George Eliot and that good lady has, "She's only a girl - she can't play at bandy," in The Mill on the Floss.
Bandy is an English game, similar to hockey, played with sticks shaped like hockey sticks, and a small wooden ball, which each team tries to drive through a goal. A hundred years ago it was a national sport, and by all accounts a rough one. Bandy was also the name of the stick used in the game; the term bandy-legged probably came from that.
Interestingly, bandy is also an old name for a form of tennis; some think that because both tennis and this English game involve striking a ball to and fro, the verb, to bandy, came into being. "We bandied words" is a nice way of saying, "We had an argument." I suppose Shakespeare had tennis in mind in Romeo and Juliet: "Had she affections and warm youthful blood, She'd be as swift in motion as a ball; My words would bandy her to my sweet love. And his to me." But as to bandy's origin, French bander, to team up (against) has been suggested, and John Florio, in his Italian-English dictionary of 1611, has bandare in this sense. Better hide behind "of uncertain origin" and have fun guessing, I think.