Dwile is an East Anglian word for a mop: so Eleanor White, who lives in Bishopstown, Cork, tells me. She wants to know if doily, a small ornamental table napkin or mat, made of cloth or paper and put under sandwiches or cakes, is related. It is not. Dwile, which hasn't, as far as I know, travelled to this blessed isle, is from the Dutch dweyl, a cloth to wash the floor. Compare the German zwehle, a towel. The dainty doily is called after a London linen-draper, a Mr Doiley, Doily, or Doyley, who lived in the 17th century over his shop on the Strand. The Spectator spoke of him in 1712: "The famous Doiley is still fresh in everyone's memory, who raised a fortune by finding out materials for such stuffs as might at once be cheap and genteel." Sir Harry Sloane, writing in 1727, tells us that Mr Doyly's "stuffs" were worn in summer, and Dryden, in Kind Keeper, speaks of "Doily Petticoats". John Gay, in Trivia (1714), has: "Now in thy trunk the Doily habit fold,/ The silken drugget ill can fence the cold." (Drugget was woollen material, or a mixture of wool and silk or wool and linen. From the French droguet, of unknown origin; the claim of Drogheda to the word has no historical validity.)
Swift, however, knew a doily as a napkin used at that point in the dinner when slobberers come into their own. In his Journal to Stella for April 23rd, 1711, he has: "After dinner we has coarse Doiley-napkins, fringed at each end, upon the table to drink with." The little linen or paper mats placed under cakes or sandwiches at table were not mentioned in print until 1864. They haven't gone out of fashion. John Betjeman has them in A Few Late Chrysanthemums, written in 1954: "Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys with afternoon teacakes and scones."
Some of the old-timers in west Waterford call a flitch of bacon a flick. Mary Harney from Cappoquin wonders why. Simply because flick has its origin in Old English flicce, a side of bacon, salted and cured, corresponding to Old Norse flikki. A glossary from c.700 has "Perna, flicci". Perna is Latin for a gammon. John Skelton in Colin Cloute, c.1529, refers to a "bacon flycke". George Eliot in her 1869 Adam Bede has: "Thou lookst as white as a bacon flick." This ancient variant has survived in many English dialects. I've heard it myself along the banks of the Barrow.