I recently heard a Waterford man giving out about what he considered the sartorial excesses of today's young people. He had been at a wedding and had seen friends of the groom wearing barragan trousers. It's quite a while since I last heard this word, barragan, common in the south-east for strong, working-men's twills.
Moylan has the word in The Language of Kilkenny and so had Dr Johnson in his famous dictionary, described by him as a strong, thick kind of camelot.
A long journey barracan had on its way to Waterford and Kilkenny. It's from Old French barracan (modern bouracan) from Arabic barracan, a cloak of camlet, from Persian barak, a blanket or cloak of camel's hair.
The origin of Johnson's camelot or camlet is obscure. It came into English from French chamelot in the 13th century. Chamelot was from Medieval Latin camelotum, from Arabic khamlet, which, to make things difficult for etymologists, has nothing to do with camels. Khamlet was the nap or pile on the surface of cloth; one authority states that the word is from Arabic seil el kemel, the Angora goat.
Moylan's lexicon also has blucher. I've heard this word in Carlow and in the eastern part of Wexford. It means strong, working-men's boots, usually hobnailed in the old days. I am old enough to remember junior footballers wearing them; formidable weapons they were in certain situations. The blucker was originally a half-boot, and by the middle of the 19th century it had come to mean hobnailed footwear.
By 1860 its meaning had been transferred to a third-class train carriage, a rickety hackney-cab, and the cheapest berth in a ship.
The boot and the cheapest means of public transport were named from Field Marshal von Blucher, Napoleon's old enemy, who wore stylish half-boots.
From time to time some of the dictionaries send me letters requesting educated guesses as to the origin of the words that have stumped them. One such word is fad, an intense but short-lived fashion; a personal idiosyncrasy or whim, according to Collins, which, like Oxford and Webster, says it is of uncertain origin. I know one lady, too lovely for words, who begs to disagree. Her name is Joanna Lumley.
Fad, she tells me, is from Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, and a member of the Malayo-Polynesian family; the Malagasy fad is absolutely identical in meaning to the English one. She has told Oxford. It is considering the matter.