James Fitzgerald, who comes from Waterford, has a friend who has an old-fashioned attitude to crime and punishment; he would cob the hell out of thugs and hooligans who make life a misery for so many old people in so many Irish towns nowadays. Cob is a word found in places in the south-east. Mr Fitzgerald wonders about its origin.
I've heard cob as a verb along the banks of the Barrow and it's found in Scotland and in many English dialects from the North Country down to Cornwall, Pembrokeshire and the Isle of Wight. It means to beat, especially on the posterior. Scott in Waverley (1814) has: "The porter shall have thee to his lodge, and cob thee with thine own wooden sword."
Nearer to home, Patrick Kennedy in The Banks of the Boro (1867) has: "How do they cob an offender? They draw the trousers very tight round the thick part of the thigh, and then slap the swelled muscles with all their force." The word is still in use along the banks of that little Wexford river.
It seems that in Cornwall you can cob a person anywhere: my son tells me that in a recent court case a lady was charged with cobbing a policeman on the head with a bucket when he politely inquired as to why she was driving her car on the footpath.
The Cornish policeman would not have referred to the lady in question as a frow; this word is not found south of the North Country and Yorkshire, where it is pronounced froe. It is a popular word in Scotland and it has travelled to Ulster, from where Mary Magee from Dungannon sent it to me. Frou is in general dialect use in the North. It means a big, fat, untidy, coarse woman; also a woman of low character, according to the English Dialect Dictionary, though I should add the C.I. Macafee's splendid Concise Ulster Dictionary does not give that last meaning.
The word was in English in 1390; a will made in that year speaks of "Margareta Quellyngbourgh Frowe". No sign of disparagement here. The origin of the word is the Dutch vrouw, a woman, wife, cognate, of course, with the German Frau, and for centuries after Margaret's time a frow was simply a woman of Dutch birth, assumed by the English to be a lady. It wasn't until the 18th century that frow, meaning a slut, emerged to change everything.