A MAN who lives in Rush has sent me three interesting words. He is well aware of the many old dialect words that still survive in Fingall, especially among the older people. His first word he spells ray. The sentence he gave as a help to me is: "The cow is over in the ray." Ah, I said to myself, simplicity itself. The same word as the great Clare hurler of my day, Jimmy Smyth, gave me, a flat field; a flat upland moor. The Irish re, of course. I phoned my Balbriggan friend to ask would this meaning fit his ray. Not a bit of it. His word meant the corner of a field. I went searching again and found his ray for him in Scandinavia. The Old Norse is vra, a corner, a nook.
His second word is scruct His sentence: "She had no more than a scrud of a dress on her." He heard this from his late mother, who was born in 1890. He insists the word is not screed, a shred of clothing. The word is not in any of the great dictionaries. All I can offer is that it may well be a variant of screed, which comes from the old English screade, influenced by Scandinavian words beginning with sk, the American World Books Dictionary tells me. So back I went to Scandinavia and among the sk words I found skrud, Old Icelandic, Swedish, dress, attire. Anois tu!
The third word was skrau, to scrape, scratch. Also a noun. This word, still common in the English of Tipperary, is easily identified as Irish scrabhadh, noun and verb. I can trace the Irish word no further back than the beginning of the 18th century, when the poet Aodhagan O Rathaille used it, but I now find that skrau, found in various other spellings, is common all over England. The EDD has "I scrowed all the skin off my arm." In the Lake District a scrow is a mark cut in the bark of trees destined to be felled.
Its origin? It's from Middle English scrowle, alteration, after rowle (still a common Irish pronunciation of roll), of scrow, aphetic or foreshortened form of Anglo Norman escrowe, a strip of parchment. Thus it's related to scroll. From the parchment to the scrawb made on it by penmen is not such a leap, is it?