In medieval times in the territories of the Norsemen, the concept of partnership, both inside and outside of marriage, was accepted and protected in law. In Iceland they used a legal formula when asking a court for a divorce: Ek vil skilja vit felaga minn, which means "I want to separate from my fellow." The Old Norse word felagi means literally a fee-payer. Its plural is felagar, people who put down their fee, property, for some common purpose such as the purchase of land or a boat. Felagi was borrowed by the Anglo-Saxons from Old Norse as feolaga, but this word for a partner did not cover marriage. The word has developed a number of meanings since then: our fellow may mean a companion,a holder of a fellowship in a university, and coupled with opprobrious adjectives like "quare", and innocuous ones like "nice", it simply means any man. J. Rice from Waterford wrote to ask about the word's history.
Mary Herlihy wrote from Douglas, Cork, about two words, brouhaha and shibboleth, used more in the US than on this side of the Atlantic, I think. Brouhaha, hubbub, can be traced to fifteenth century French farce in which the devil made his entrance by shouting: "Brou, brou, brou, ha ha, brou, ha ha!" Onomatopoeic, some say. But Webster's dictionary suggests that its origins may lie in the Hebrew phrase barukh habba, "blessed be he who enters", from Psalm 118, which has a prominent place in Jewish worship, because it is the last of the Hallel psalms, used at the great festivals. The fact that the Italian dialect word baruccaba comes from the same phrase and also means hubbub, makes the suggestion of a Hebrew origin for brouhaha far from farfetched. Barukh habba, frequently and rapidly spoken, could have come to stand for confused speech, and then confusion, hubbub.
Shibboleth, a use of language or custom regarded as distinctive of a particular group, also a slogan or catchword used by a particular group, came into English from an encounter between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites related in the Book of Judges. The routed Ephraimite stragglers came to a ford on the Jordan held by the enemy. As each man came to the river, he was asked to pronounce the Hebrew word for a stream, shibboleth. The Ephraimites weren't able to pronouce a sh sound, and said sibboleths, and so, the Good Book tells us, "there fell at the time of the Ephaimites forty and two thousand." Quite a brouhaha, you might say.