"I have a few shocks for you", writes James Gilmartin from London's North Kensington, originally from Kilkenny. "Why do Irish people say things like `I feel shockin' bad' or worse still, `she's a shockin' nice girl'? You'd never hear an English person say the like.
Indeed you would, James.
Shocking is commonly used as an intensitive all over England from Yorkshire to the southern shires. Let me give you some examples, all from Joe Wright's monumental EDD: "I was astonished to find what a shocking nice taste it had" (Isle of Wight).
"He was quiet shocking (exceedingly quiet) and wouldn't hurt a fly" (Isle of Man). "Ther' wull be a shockin' bad' crop o' turmuts (turnips) if us dwoant get zome raain" (Berkshire). "He took ill hisself wi' burn gout: tormented him shockin' cruel" (Devon).
Of course this intensitive is found all over Ireland, too. In the north it is found as a noun in the phrase "mhy shockin" an exclamation. Lyttle, read more for the dialect than for any other reason nowadays, I suspect, wrote in Paddy McQuillan, "A katched her at last, an' my shockin'! if she dinnae kick an' sqeal an' struggle."
From Old French choc, from choquier, to make violent contact with. Undoubtedly of Germanic origin, related to Middle High German schoc.
The other shock referred to by Mr Gilmartin is sometimes spelled shoch, shough, sheoch, and shaugh. It means a pull of the pipe, a smoke.
It is still used in all four provinces as a noun. In Ulster it is also found as a verb. Seamus MacManus of Donegal in his whimsical The Bend of the Road (1898) has, `Himself and the Playboy shoughed out o' the same pipe'. This is the Irish seach, a turn; Dinneen has, seach tobac, a smoke of a pipe.
Mary Grace, writing from Kilkenny, asks about her mother's expression reel foot. A reel foot is a deformed foot, thought by our superstitious ancestors to be induced by walking in pregnancy over a grave. I was aware of this term (and of its Irish antecedent) from manuscripts sent by schoolmasters in the 1930s and 1940s to the Irish Folklore Commission. It seems to have been common all over Leinster and Ulster and I notice that it is included in the new Concise Ulster Dictionary, which does not venture an etymology.
Reel is a corruption of the Irish reilig, a grave; the full Irish phrase for the deformity being cam reilige (cam means crooked; reilige is genitive of reilig, in case your Irish is rusty).