Two female friends of mine from Cork city wrote to ask about the origin of conjun box, a child's money box, a piggybank. Sean Beecher has the word in A Dictionary of Cork Slang (1983). He says that the word is possibly from Tamil kanji, "a lock-up (military), hence a place to keep money; possibly introduced into Cork by the Munster Fusiliers".
Kanji doesn't mean a lock-up. Bernard Share, in Slanguage, is right in saying that the Tamil word means water in which rice has been boiled, a source of vitamins and carbohydrates, and a staple nourishment for prisoners in India. A precious substance, therefore. From kanjee came conjun, a little box for hoarding precious pennies.
I have no doubt whatever that conjun box is what they say north of the Lee; but when I inquired further I was told that conjurin' box is what is said in other places. Whether this conjurin' is a mistaken "correction", I don't know; all I can say is that it exists in Ovens and in Glasheen, from where Mrs Maureen McAlister wrote to tell me that she often heard girls at her school talk of opening their conjurin' boxes unknown to their parents if they were stuck for ready cash.
Conjuring is a participial adjective that means "that conjures, enchants, works magic", to give Oxford's definition. It would seem to fit the bill too. I am inclined to side with Mr Share if only because in the Munster Fusiliers' strongholds of Cork city the word has always been, and still is, conjun. An interesting word I heard on my recent travels in Cork was spadger. A woman in Blackpool called to her little son who was playing in the street; "Come in to your tea, you little spadger." Beecher has spadgy. Spadger is a fanciful alteration of "sparrow". It is an import from England. The English Dialect Dictionary has it from 14 counties. Robinson's Dialect of Leeds, published in 1862, tells us that "spadger pie is an article of diet occasionally".
By far the most interesting word I have heard this year is one I heard in Dungarvan last week: tack. "God keep that tack from us", a farmer from the area said of the foot-and-mouth plague. From French tac this, "a kind of rot among sheep, also a plague spot", according to Randle Cotgrove's French-English dictionary of 1610. The French word is from the Latin tactus, found in the sense infectious, contagious disease.