May I thank the many people who wrote to tell me that the Cork word, bastible, a pot oven, got its name from the Devonshire town in which these utensils were first made, Barnstaple. Seeing that Jurgen Kullman from Dortmund was the first to let me know, to him goes the lollipop.
An interesting letter from Paul Harries of Canterbury, a teacher of English. "I read with great interest your gloss on stellan, stillion, etc. You'll know the passage in King Lear: `The sea, with such a storm as his bare head in hell-black night endured, would have buoy'd up, and quench'd the stelled fires'. For many years I have been repeating to my students the received explanation of stelled as being one of Shakespeare's coinages, a contraction for stellated, from Latin stella.
"How wrong so many of the commentators are in this! It is now clear to me that stelled is from the same source as your stellan, old English stellan, to set, place, and that what the great man meant when he wrote stelled fires was fixed stars."
I'd accept that. I note that Shakespeare also has: "Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stelled Thy beauty's form in table of my heart" in Sonnet 24. Full marks, Mr Harries.
Ciaran O Muiri of Anner Road, Inchicore, was having a jar with some men in a Coolock pub recently. One of them remarked that he would rather drink in a hotel. This, Ciaran tells me, was greeted with laughter, and somebody said that your man only went there because of the wiggers. The word meant women, he was told.
A fine old word this, related to the verb wig, to waggle, shake, and also to wiggle. The word is in English since the 13th century when it was imported from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch wiggelen. By 1900 it was confined to Shetland, according to the EDD, which had never heard of Coolock and its wigging pieces.
Piece is a word used almost exclusively in contempt of a woman by other women in the area around Clonmel, according to a medical doctor who knows which side his bread is buttered on and so desires anonymity. Old slang this, and common. Shakespeare has it in Titus Andronicus: "Go, give that changing piece to him that flourish'd for her with his sword." The speaker was male, however: Saturninus, a wigger fancier who never gave much thought to political correctness, sensible man.