HURLING goalkeepers are people apart, agile as cats, courageous as toreros, so I have no intention of disparaging the breed by telling you where I recently heard one of them described as a durn, except to say it was at a club match somewhere in the south-east. My companion was worried about his team's goalie; like you-know-who he stoppeth one of three, and that on a good day, I was told.
"Look at him, rooted to the ground like a bloody durn", my friend exclaimed when goal number four went in. Certainly, he was no Tony Reddan, the best I've ever seen. I sense that my companion would not just then have appreciated an inquiry as to the meaning and etymology of durn; later he explained that a durn was the pillar of a gate.
Since then I have heard that the word was once common in north Co Dublin, where it meant the jamb of a door. The dialect dictionaries of England tell me the word is common there, especially in the southern counties, and in Yorkshire too. There are a variety of regional variants, dorn, darn, dearn, doorn among them. I'm sure the word has a Norse origin; Swedish has dyrni, a door-post.
Gerry McCarthy, of Botanic Road, Glasnevin, tells me his mother, a north Cork woman, used the word mook when she referred to a dim-wit.
I think the word has the same pedigree as mooch, a word as common across the water as it is here.
Mooch, noun and verb, is from Norman French mucher, Old French mucer, to hide, secrete. Obviously its meaning has since been expanded, as has the meaning of mitch.
Is mooch related to mitch? Mitch, as well as to play truant from school, means, as does mooch, to idle. Mitch is from Old English mycan, to steal. But mycan and the French words I mentioned above probably have a common Germanic origin. Consider the Old High German muhhan, to prey upon.
Mooching and mitching have for centuries been connected with blackberries. Indeed, the dialect dictionaries tell me that in many parts of rural England mooch and moocher, mitch and mitcher, are common words both for blackberries and those who pick them. So that Falstaff, when he says: "Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and eat blackberries?", was referring not to truancy but to a picker of the luscious fruit of the humble bramble, Irish dris.