I met a man the other night who told me that I should publish, some day, a glossary of terms of contempt. I might do that; I am constantly coming on beauties from all over the country, courtesy of correspondents who are, like myself, amused by them.
The word firkle came my way recently from John Boyd, from Bangor, Co Down. The English Dialect Dictionary has it from Co Antrim, where somebody called a neighbour "a dirty firkle". It probably came into English from the Low German ferkle, which gave the identical word in modern German, meaning a pig.
Gick, which came my way from P. Morrissey, from Waterford, means a fool, a stupid, clumsy fellow. More often spelled geck, it is found as well in Carlow and Wexford; it was imported from England, where it is common in Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Yorkshire and Cornwall. Shakespeare has it; we find "The most notorious geck and gull/ That e'er invention played on", in Twelfth Night.
I see that George Eliot has the word in Adam Bede: "If she's tackled to a geck as everybody's a-laughin' at."
The origin of the word is the Dutch geck, "a foole", according to Henry Hexham's EnglishDutch dictionary of 1647.
Gick/geck should not be confused with gink, a term of reproach applied only to a girl considered frivolous by old-fashioned women in the south-eastern counties. I can't find it in the dialect dictionaries, though there's a Scottish ginkie, a term of reproach applied to a light-hearted girl.
There is the American slang gink, a pejorative term used only in reference to men, which has reached Ireland. P.G. Wodehouse has it in A Damsel in Distress: "I'm certain this gink is giving her a raw deal". Of unknown origin, I'm afraid; the Scottish ginkie is much older than the slang word, but they may be related.
Grissy is a word I heard many moons ago in the schoolyards of Kilkenny. It is a cruel word, said to taunt somebody fat. It is an old word, though, from the Old Norse griss, a young pig, a banbh.
A buddion is an offensive term used by boys of other boys in Fermanagh, the late Joan Trimble once told me. This is from Irish boidin, a diminutive penis. A peeodler is a northern word for a mischievous person. Loreto Todd has it in her Words Apart, a Dictionary of Northern English. It's from the Irish peadoir, I think, a meddler, trickster, according to Dinneen.