My thanks to Giles Hillson, Whitestrand Road, Galway, to Joan Conroy of Cromwellfort Road, Dublin, and to Brendan Geoghegan of Loughrane Terrace, Mervue, Galway, for solving the problem of marriages over the tongs. These marriages, my three correspondents point out, were celebrated in the old days in the blacksmith's forge in Gretna Green. Stepping over the tongs sealed the bargain.
Alf Mac Lochlainn, librarian and scholar, wrote from Galway about the word louser. He remembers coming across an antiCumann na nGaodhal election flyer which quoted, against him, of course, something Michael Tierney had said about the unemployed: "The lousers won't work." Recently he came across a book of Scots verse, published in 1921 in London: Bonnie Joann and Other Poems.
In it, its author, Violet Jacob, wrote: "The years are slippin' past ye like water past the bows, Roond half the warld ye've tossed yer dram but sune ye'll have to lowse." My friend wonders was Tierney, the classical scholar, using the word very correctly, however offensively, to mean "idlers", and not, as his opponents, thought, people infested with lice?
Yes, I have no doubt that louser and lowser are simply variant spellings, and that they have nothing to do with louse, the bug (Old English lus). The EDD has a couple of pages on louse/lowse, a form of "loose". It hasn't got louser, an idler, but it gives a Yorkshire variant lowsing, a noun. To lowse/to loose, means, among other things, to leave off, to stop working, to idle, to lead a vagabond life.
Hence, a pit stopped for the day before the proper or usual time was said to be lowsed out. The general idea was to loosen, unfasten, unbind: to lowse cattle was to let them loose to graze: to lowse the table in Yorkshire meant to say grace, so that people could begin to eat. From Middle English los, loose, from the Old Norse lauss.
John Hall owns a hill farm in Co Down: he prefers not to say where. He sends me the Down word flake, which his father, a Galloway man, also used. It means a temporary gate to close a gap. Vigfusson's dictionary leads me to believe that this is from Old Norse fleki, a hurdle. I'm told that in Antrim and in parts of Donegal a flake was an arrangement of branches on which flax was formerly dried over a fire.