A story related by Brewer in his famously unreliable dictionary tells of Ben Jonson arguing the toss with a snobbish squire. Said Ben: "What care I for your dirt and clods? Where you have an acre of land I have 10 acres of wit." The squire retorted: "Good Mr Wiseacre."
Brewer was a dab hand at chancing his arm when he hadn't a clue as to the origin of a word or a phrase. Wiseacre is from Middle Dutch wigssegger, a sayer of wise words. Modern German has Weissager. Ruth Hall from Craigavon asked about the word.
Some of the people who have taken to philosophising in print and on local radio about the gypsies who have come ashore in Rosslare are a bit confused about the languages they speak, confusing Romanian with Romany. Romanian belongs to the Romance group of the IndoEuropean family; Romany belongs to the Indic branch of the same family, although it contains many words borrowed from local European tongues. Romany means gypsy, and comes ultimately from the Sanskrit domba, a musician of low caste. The gypsies will find a lot of dombas in some Wexford pubs I know.
George Borrow's engaging book, The Romany Rye, means The Gypsy Gentleman. Rye is related to Latin rex, to the Spanish rey, to the French roi, to the Hindi raja, and to our own ri. The Sanskrit root word was rajan, king. It's a small world, God knows.
John Burke, a Galwayman living in Manchester, asks about an expression they used in his youth - to ted, which means to turn and spread newly-mown hay to help it dry. I've come across this word in Lover's Legends (1848): "She was all day teddin' the new-cut grass". The word was once in general dialect use in Scotland, Ireland and England. It's from the Old Norse tethja, to spread manure, itself from tad, dung, and Old High German zetten, to spread.
Dr David Sowby of Foxrock reminds me that Shakespeare used the word tetter, ringworm, as a noun in Hamlet. He used it as a verb in Corialanus: "So shall my lungs coin words till their decay against those measels, which we disdain should tetter us". The traveller I heard it from also had it as both noun and verb. Explaining her child's ringworm, she said: "She got tettered by an oul' ass we have."