I recently heard a story about an incident which took place in a Co Carlow restaurant, involving a waitress who used a word bordering on the obsolete, I should think, to describe a customer.
The gentleman in question, previous to a dignified and unhurried departure, had told her that a local politician, who was at the time drowning his sorrows with some election workers out in the bar, had kindly insisted on paying for his substantial meal.
It became obvious some time later that this was not the case. She called the duplicitous one, who was not known to her, a right hind; what your man, the unsuccessful county council candidate, called him, we may guess.
A hind in parts of the southeast, is a boyo, a rascal. I've heard the word in my youth in western Wexford and in south Carlow by the banks of the lordly Barrow. The word is common still all over Scotland and England, but I note that the Irish shade of meaning has, according to the English Dialect Dictionary, been recorded only in Norfolk.
In both Scotland and the northern counties of England a hind was, in the old days, a farm labourer engaged by the year and provided with a house, firing, milk, meal and potatoes. Little or no money changed hands. Often a stipulation was made that the hind must furnish a female farm worker, usually a wife or daughter, at an agreed price per day, with an extra wage in harvest time. She was called a bondager. From hind came the adjective hindish, rustic, clumsy, clownish, and, of course, my waitress's noun.
The word's prevalence in the speech and in the literature of Scotland would suggest that the word must also be found in Ulster, but I can find no mention of it in the dialect dictionaries.
Hind was formed from Old English hi(g)na, genitive plural of hiwa, higa, member of a family, a servant. The d is excrescent.
Mary Byrne from Sutton asks what the correct pronunciation of rowan, the mountain ash, is. Well, in Scotland they pronounce it to rhyme with "brown", and in the north of England it is pronounced roan. In Ulster they vary the two. You may also call it ranty, a contracted form of rowan tree, as they do in some parts of Ulster. Rowan is of Scandinavian origin; a Norwegian dialectal form is raun. A lucky tree, they say. Caorthann is the Irish name.