"The other day," writes a lady from Athlone who doesn't want her name mentioned because of the slagging she might get from the natives as well as incurring family wrath, "in a hotel close to town, I was asked what age my pigeon was. The pigeon happened to be my 18-year-old daughter, who, if I may say so, is quite lovely. Is this rather offensive term common? Is it confined to the Irish midlands?"
It is very common all over this island, the next island to us, and the United States. Joyce uses it as a term of endearment in the Portrait: "Is that you, pigeon?" But the word was used of a young woman in Elizabethan times. Greene, in 1592, writing about the thankless people often encountered in this imperfect world, has: "When they had spent upon her what they had, then forsooth she and her young pigeon (her daughter) turne them out of doores like prodigal children." There are only a few references in literature prior to that, but we can be sure that the usage was common since the Middle Ages, when English had borrowed pyjon, pejon from Old French pijon, pyjoun, a dove, a young bird. The fact that Spanish has pichon and Italian piccione points to the word's origin: Late Latin pipio, a young bird, from Latin pipere, to cheep, chirp. An imitative word this pipere, like the Greek pipos, a young bird, and, long, long ago, the Sanskrit pippaka, a species of bird whose name was an imitation of its call.
Pat MacCarthy of Dooradoyle, Limerick, asks about the verb rile, to annoy, perturb. The origin of the verb may lie with medieval French builders. Ruiler to them meant to mix up mortar. When imported into English as roile or roil, it took the meaning, to make a stream dirty by disturbing sediment on its bottom. Figuratively, it came to mean to disorder, to perturb. The Elizabethan polemicist Greenwood has: "You haue nothing to say but to royle the doctrine with your feete least others should drinke thereof". Roil, sometimes spelled royle, was pronounced rile in Greenwood's time and for centuries afterwards in England. It is also well attested to that the American colonists also pronounced, and spelled, join as jine; boiled as biled; poison as pison and pizen; and so forth. And you wouldn't have to travel far from Dooradoyle to hear the same pronunciations today.