Margaret Power's mother made colcannon in the oul' skillet pot, just like the lady in the song. I'd like to know the origin of skillet she says. Where my mother came from, Slieverue in south Kilkenny, Irish was spoken until the turn of the century, and I've often wondered if it's Irish.
The Irish, scillead, is a borrowing from English, but where the English came from is a bit of a mystery. Collins says that it's related to middle English word - skele, which in turn is from the Old Norse skjola, a bucket. Oxford pleads ignorance. I think skillet may have come in with Margaret's ancestors. The Old French has the word escuelette, a little dish. Apart from being set before one on the table it was also used in cooking.
"You may or may not be familiar with a word which, having never seen it spelled, I'll write as ardhews, emphasis on the second syllable. The old people around Kingscourt used it a lot when I was growing up, and that's not today or yesterday. They'd say, `ah sure, don't heed the poor gossons, its only the ardhews', when they made excuses for high jinks that had got out of hand at a wake, say. Can you throw any light on this word for me?' Thus spake Mary O'Hanlon who now lives not far from Cambridge.
The excellent Ulster Dialect Dictionary has this as `ardhughs, noun, plural, antics, capers, origin unknown.' I'd say, without fear of contradiction, that the origin is the Irish ardu; here it has the English-s plural ending.
O Donaill's dictionary defines Ardu as excitement as well as the verbal noun of ardaigh, rise.
It's not unknown in the south either. An old Glenmore, Co Kilkenny, woman to whom I mentioned in my long lost youth that I had never seen anything in my life as sexy as La Monroe singing that song in Some Like It Hot, said that she might send her husband to the pictures to see if Marilyn would give him th'ardoo as well. The priapic slant, if that's the correct phrase in this context, would not, I feel, have been included in the Ulster Dialect Dictionary, where `obscenities have been omitted where it was thought they might cause offence'. From a dialect dictionary, for God's sake?