James Baxter, a Cavan man now living in Dublin, wrote to me to ask where the word groop a trench in a byre into which cow dung was shovelled came from. The same day's post brought a letter from a lady who lives near The Harrow in Co Wexford, whose name I cannot reveal.
She asks about the word gripe, a word she has been amused by ever since a handsome gentleman asked her out of a dance in that part of the world 50 years ago with the enticingly romantic promise of bein' fairly sure, like, that he could find them a dry gripe to go into for an oul' hoult.
A gripe is a dike, a northern sheugh. And gentle readers, she went, she tells me, and she has never regretted it. A year or two later, she married him.
Well now, groop and gripe are cousins, so to speak. Gripe is found all over Ireland, and is just as common in England, where it is also found as grip, grape, greape, and greep. Tennyson, in one of his mistaken incursions into dialect verse, has "An `e ligs on `s back i' the greep." Scotland and Orkney also have this word in one form or another.
Groop is very popular in Scotland, where it is known only in Mr Reilly's sense of a channel in the floor of a cowhouse. Both words are from Old English greop, a trench. The English word is cognate with Middle Low German grope, Middle Dutch greppe, and the more modern greop, a trench.
I'm not sure if medieval Germans groped in gropes, but the word that means to feel with the hands, to examine, according to the saints of Oxford, is itself an old word. It is in Old English as grapiari, cognate with Old Norse greipa, to snatch, grab. That's enough of sex for one day.
Madge McQuaid, of Betty Glen, Raheny, asks me the origin of to red up, to tidy. This seems to be confined to the northern part of Ireland. Carleton has, "Tom's barn that was red up for us." But red(d) is also found in Scotland and in northern England. By inversion, the phrase a fine red up is still used in Yorkshire, I'm told, to indicate a sense of disorder. This red is from Old English (ge)raeddari, to arrange, direct, provide for.