There are so many allegations of skulduggery being levelled at the moment at so many of our beloved policasters that I consider the word I heard used by an old Wicklow lady the other night as rather mild. "A proper whipster, that fellow", she said.
Whipster is an old word. It means a doubtful character, an untrustworthy fellow. It echoes the origins of whip, Middle Dutch and Middle Low German wippen, to move up and down, to oscillate, to swing. The -ster bit is from Middle English - estre, Old English istre, - estre, a feminine suffix. There is then an indication of contemptuous inferiority implied in my Wicklow lady"s feminine termnination just as there was in Shakespeare"s "Every puny whipster gets my sword." Othello, children. In Donegal, and perhaps in other places in Ireland as well, a whipster is what a Dubliner would call a rozzie, a romping girl, according to Simmons's Donegal glossary of 1890.
John Burke, a Galwayman writing from Long Island, New York, sent me a word I haven"t heard in years, rouse, which means a drinking bout. John asks why the word in attenuated: he, like myself, thought it a variant of carouse. It's not, apparently. When John writes, "He was on a ferocious rouse in Ballinasloe", I take it that he heard the word at home and not in America.
Carouse is from German (trink) gar aus, (drink) all up. Rouse is from a different source. It has nothing to do with the rouse which means to excite into action. That rouse is from Old English hreosan, to rusk. No, John"s rouse is related to the Swedish rus, a drinking bout. They also have rusa, to fuddle. That the word is Scandinavian may also be suspected from this passage in Dekker's The Gulls Hornbook (1609): "Tell me tgen soveraigne skinker, how to take the German's upsy-freeze, the Danish rowsa, the Switzer's stopp to Rheinish." You won't be surprised that Master Shakespeare also knew the word. He has "The King's rouse the heavens shall bruit again" in Hamlet. In Othello we find "They have given me a rouse already": here rouse meant a bumper, a large measure.
Can anybody help with two words sent to me by Gerry McCarthy of Botanic Road, Glasnevin?: cohallion and coheemer. "The reference was always to elderly gentlemen who would qualify for the description lovable, gramhar," says my correspondent. East Waterford words these.