John Creedon is from Cork and he sent me some of his late father's words and phrases. The old man was a soldier who saw action in the Great War; his son asks about the origin of some of the words he remembers from him.
`I see you're all dressed up. Binting again? Binting, courting. Arabic bint, a girl. I notice that Sheik Mahommad has bint as a suffix in some of his fillies' names.
`She's a barjee in the Victoria.' The Hindi is bawarchi, a cook. `His bundock is the soldier's only friend.' The Swahili is bunduki a rifle.
A dekko, a look, as in `give us a dekko at the paper' is still heard in many places. The Hindi is dekhna, to see; the imperative is dekho, look! see!
That pleasant sounding word naughty, nowadays used as a word of mock censure, is the subject of a letter from Joyce Willis of Lichfield, formerly of Sutton. What troubles Joyce is that in some rural areas around her English home, naughty means something a little different. For example, people fed up to the teeth with a local politician might say, `he's a naughty bugger and should be got rid of.' Naughty here means good for nothing.
Naughty has an interesting history. It comes from Old English, nawhit, from na, no & wiht, thing, and early in its history it meant useless. To think that this original meaning still survives! The Bible of Shakespeare's time has, from Jeremiah, `The other basket had very naughty figs', and Shakespeare's naughty in `a good deed in a naughty world' also meant corrupt".
But let's see what the great Dr Johnson from Lichfield had to say about the word. `Naughty: adj. Bad, wicked corrupt. It is now seldom used but in ludicrous censure.' I feel certain that the old curmudgeon would be happy to know that the older meaning survives still close to his home.
Lichfield itself is an interesting placename. It comes from Old English lic, a corpse. So Johnson's town grew up around a graveyard. The lichgate in a cemetery was where the bier was put down to allow the mourners to catch up. The owl is known in places as lichowl, a bird of ill omen to some of the great names of literature, Pliny, Ovid and Shakespeare among them; whereas in my part of the world to see the owl is a foretoken of good luck. In Wexford Athena's wise old bird still rules OK.