I heard the word drench in a Kildare farmhouse recently. The drench in question was a drink, a drop of whiskey as it happened. I was amazed by this survival from Jacobean English: Ben Jonson in The Staple of News (1625) has this: `A drench of sack at a good tavern would cure him'. Drench and drink are from Old English drenc; I have never heard drench used in the Kildare manner before, and I see that this meaning has not, according to Joseph Wright's great dialect dictionary, been recorded across the water. A drench, meaning a medicinal drink given to animals, is common, of course.
P.W. Joyce has `drench, used in a peculiar sense in Ireland', in his English As We Speak It In Ireland, first published in 1910, and reprinted with a valuable introduction by T.P. Dolan, in 1979. Says Joyce: `A drench is a philtre, a love-potion, a love-compelling drink over which certain charms were repeated during its preparation. Made by boiling certain herbs (Orchis) in water or milk, and the person drinks it unsuspectingly.
In my boyhood time a beautiful young girl belonging to a most respectable family ran off with an ill-favoured, obscure, beggarly, diseased wretch. The occurrence was looked on with great astonishment and horror by the people, and no wonder: and the universal belief was that the fellow's old mother had given the poor fellow a drench. To this hour I cannot make any guess at the cause of that astounding elopement: and it is not surprising that the people were driven to the supernatural for an explanation'.
P.W. Joyce was a Limerickman; I'm sure he knew that the Irish for the orchis used in the concoction is magairlin meidhreach, a word found in south Dublin English by Liam O Broin not so long ago as mogolyeen mire. In 1881 the Folk-Lore Record said: `The early purple orchis, Orchis mescula, is called mogra myra, and is supposed to be most efficient as a love potion'. The compound noun may be translated as `jolly little testicle'.
Another good word of Joyce's is dozed, used of unsound timber. I came across it in an English craft book called Building in Water, published in 1776: `Bog oak timber is always found to be frushy, dozed and short-grained'. Frushy means easily broken; from Old French fruissier (modern froisser), to break into small pieces. As for dozed, it is from Old Norse dus, lull, dead calm. Thus it's related to doze, to nap.