Ms Mary O'Neill, from the town of Dungannon, wonders where the dickens the phrase What The Dickens? comes from. Is it older than Charles, the novelist, she wonders?
The dickens, in what was once a petty oath, is probably a corruption of devilkins. Mrs Page, answering Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, says: "I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of." Further back than this I can't go, I'm afraid.
That lovely word dawn is of interest to a young lady, Ms Jacqueline Hunt, who is writing a transition-year paper in physics. All she wants from me is information as to the word's origin, thank God - as a physicist I never quite made the grade, any grade.
The word is short for dawning, from Old English dagian, to dawn. The daw part is interesting: to daw meant to become day. Both daw and day are derived from the same root as the Sanskrit dah, to burn. The Aryans long ago saw the dawn as the flame burning in the east, and so it became personified as Dahana, the flaming one. The Greeks borrowed Dahana as Daphne, which means laurel, the virgin daughter of the river-god, Peneios.
She was chased by the sun god, Apollo, who was desperately in love with her. Ovid told her story memorably in Metamorphoses: her father, answering her prayers, changed her into a laurel tree and poor old Apollo, when he finally caught up with her, could feel her heart fluttering beneath the bark. Henceforth, the god declared, the laurel, Daphne, would be associated with glory.
The myth has inspired many great works of art, "Jacqueline", notably Bernini's superb baroque sculpture which shows Daphne being pursued by the handsome young god, and the Renaissance painter Pollaiuolo's depiction of Daphne being transformed into a laurel tree as poor Apollo arrives too late.
Start chasing a word and God only knows where you'll end up. Take Ms Audrey Dalton's paradise. In old Persian, diz means to mould and pairi is equivalent to the Greek peri which begins many English words, such as perimeter, and means "around".
Paradaeza means a place fenced around: the pleasure gardens of a Persian nobleman, in particular. Xenophon introduced the word into Greek as paradeisos, and the translators of the Bible into Greek, finding no word for a place of perfect bliss, and knowing no people as given to luxury as the Persians, chose Xenophon's word to represent heaven.