The fishermen who live near the banks of the Barrow use a long flatbot tomed punt called a cot. Margaret Gladney, who hails from Kilkenny, wants to know if the boat and the word for it is confined to the estuaries of the southeast. No. .W.H. Patterson, in the glossary he published in 1880, has the word from Antrim, and the Donegal collector, Simmons, heard the word around the same time. The Irish is coite, the Scots Gaelic is coit, and the ultimate origin is probably Old Irish coit, wood.
From Anne Robinson who lives in Bangor comes a query about the word ben. This was one of her father's words; he was from the Ards peninsula, still the home of a rich Scots-based English. Ben is the inner room of a farmhouse.
Carr's Caledonian Sketches, published in 1807 informs us that "a tolerable hut is divided into three parts: a butt, which is the kitchen; a benn, an inner room; and a byar where the cattle are housed". Ben was originally an adverb meaning in, inside; within, especially in or into the best room in the house.
"With kindly welcome Jenny brings him ben," wrote Burns in The Cotter's Saturday Night. hence the compounds ben-by, into the parlour; ben-end, ben-house and ben-room, the best room in a house, hence, figuratively, the best part of anything. Douglas has ben in his Eneados (1513): "And furious flamb spreading fra thak to thak, baith but and ben." Both the adverb and the noun are from the Old English bionna, within.
A mourner at Donal McCann's funeral in Monaseed told me that many's the time Donal came cosherin' to his house when his world was young. Cosher is Irish cisir, a party, and to cosher means to pay a friendly visit. The English Dialect Dictionary quotes from the Manchester Evening Chronicle of May 25, 1987: "Very much of these Milesians have been all their lives wall-bearers, cosherers, and waiters on Providence, and are better off in every respect now than they ever were in their own country."
Patrick Kennedy, who was born not a thousand miles from Mona seed, wrote in his Fireside Stories (1870): "You have let your side down so low by your coshering and cuggering [from Irish cogar, whisper] with that woodman." Bailey's Dictionary of 1721 has the word, the first English dic tionary to include it: "Coshering (in the Feudal Law) a perogative which some Lords of Manors antiently had, to lie and feast themselves and their retinue at their tenant's house."