Up north they still use the word skilly for thin, watery porridge. It comes from the fanciful formation skillygolee. Once I observed a Donegal farmer sending back a bowl of consomme he had mistaken for a thick broth, explaining to the waitress that he had no mind for aul' skillygolee. Ms Rose Sweeney from Durham, a native of Co Donegal, she tells me, asks about the words. She informs me that both words may also be used in describing weak tea or coffee.
Simmons's glossary of Donegal English (1890), used by Joseph Wright in his great dialect dictionary, has the words, both in general dialect and slang use, in Scotland and England. Oxford insists that skilly is derived from skillygolee, which seems to have started life before the mast in the British navy.
The earliest reference to it is in a memoir written by a sailor in 1819: "Tolerable flour, of which the cook composed a certain flour for breakfast, known among sailors as skilligolee, being in plain English, paste."
From the ships it transferred to the workhouses, and later to the jails. In both places it was watery gruel.
George Sala's Gaslight and Daylight (1858) has: "In some Unions they give you bread and cheese, in some broth, and in some skillygolee." John Masefield, in The Conway (1933), has Ms Sweeney's transferred use of the word: "A cup of skilly completed the repast." He meant weak tea.
I'm sure that skilligolee was often the cause of a good rippet in the jails of yesteryear. A rippet is a noisy disturbance, an uproar, a quarrel. The word came to me from John Bryce of Bangor, who heard it in his youth in Co Antrim, near Ballymena.
The 19th-century glossaries of Down and Ulster words have rippet. Macafee's recent Ulster Dialect Dictionary has the word as well, and with the secondary meaning of "a romp, a frolic".
It is thought that the word is imitative in origin; it came to Ulster from Scots. Dunbar, in his Tua Mariit Wemen (1508) has: "He ralis, and makis repet with ryatus wordis."
The verb sowl was sent to me from Waterford by Tom Power. It means to pull by the ears. I've heard it in Wexford. Common across the water, the origin of the word is unknown.
Shakespeare knew it. In Coriolanus, he has: "He'll go, he says, and sowl the porter of Rome gates by the ears." I'm glad to be reminded of the old word.