Some time ago I mentioned the Co Wicklow verb panch, to remove the entrails from a rabbit. Since then, I have received an interesting letter from Dr Vincent McMahon who practises medicine in Carbonear, Newfoundland. He says panch is in everyday use in his part of the world, but that it is "generally applied to the butchering of moose, several thousand of which are hunted and shot in the woods yearly".
I forgot to mention the origin of panch. It's a variant of paunch, itself from Old French panche, from Latin pantex. Jehan Palsgrave in his 1530 Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse has "Je pance, I panch a man, I perysshe his guttes with a wepen."
Dr McMahon went on to write about the noun shoddy, waste from carding machines, refuse from worsted spinning mills, recently mentioned here. No doubt he felt like perysshinge a certain clothier's guttes with a wepen back in the early 1950s, when, "with my own hard-earned cash I purchased my first suit for a little over £6.
"This was the most dearly bought clothing I have ever had. The trousers disintegrated in four weeks and the jacket in six. A few years later I could afford to go to a bespoke tailor and I told him my sad tale. He said `You bought a suit of shoddy'. He told me that shoddy was manufactured in the English midlands from 90 per cent re-teased rugs and 10 per cent wool to bind the short fibres. It was invariably dyed charcoal to hide the light threads and the stuff was purchased only by the very poor for weddings and funerals."
A bad quilt, no doubt, was the man who sold that suit. Quilt is a Dublin word, and it comes from Irish cuileat, a knave, or at least I think it does. Mary O'Hara from Boswell Street, London, questions this etymology of mine given in my Dictionary of Anglo-Irish. "What about Shakespeare's quilt in Henry IV, part I?'` she asks: "How now, blowne Jack? How now quilt?"
This is merely the word for a thick covering for a bed, humourously applied to a fat person. It's from Old French (12th century) cuilte. I have given thought, too, to yet another quilt but as it has never been attested to outside one English county, I've left it out of the reckoning. It means a boil, a pimple. No, I'll stick to my knave.