An honest Ulsterman by the name of John McArthur has sent me a brace of interesting words from the Sperrins, where his mother came from. The first of them is frack. It means a blister.
The Concise Ulster Dictionary doesn't have this word but there is a Scots word farack, a small mark on the skin, a word that comes from Old Norse far, a mark, track or print. I have little doubt that frack is related to another dialect word, freck, a verb that means to mark with spots, to dapple. My old friend John Clare has this in a poem of 1821: "In whose margins flags were freckt"; and again in the same poem, The eve put on her sweetest shroud, Freck'd with white and purple cloud".
Another word that undoubtedly came to Ulster from either the north of England or Scotland is greeking: the greeking of the day is the dawn. Scott has a note on this greeking, sometimes spelled greiking, but Douglas had it back in 1513 in Eneados: "Quhen the quene The first greking of the day has sene." This is a derivative of Old norse gryja, to dawn. Compare Danish and Swedish gry.
Jack Reid comes from the Isle of Man to Greystones every Christmas and he gave me the word flake, a sandy patch among submerged rocks. I had heard of this word; Manx folklore has it that mermaids sleep in the flakes and that they lure good-looking sailors down there for a bit of how's-your-granny-for-slack. Again, this is a Norse word; compare Norwegian dialect flak and flag.
My old friend, the fisherman Jack Devereux of Kilmore Quay died just before Christmas. He gave me over the course of time many good words that had been overlooked by the lexicographers. Soustrum, he told me, is the south-going tide; norstrum is the tide that flows north. Compare the Dutch stroom, the German strom. Traams, the end-pieces in the shafts of a cart. Middle Dutch and Middle Low German trame. Waur, to notice. "I didn't waur you going by." This from Old English warian. He never said "this morning"; it was always "today mornin". Wingeens, plural, was his word for flotsam. I have no idea as to its origin, nor do I know where his pulmare came from, "an untilled pathway between crops in a field, between barley and oats, for example."
I'll miss him. God look to him.