I am grateful to many readers for informing me that Billy Colfer's Slade word, stellin(g) is found in many places in various disguises. Madge Anderson, of Trees Road, Mount Merrion, Dublin, remembers her mother's stillion, a timber bench or form, pronounced furrum (Irish fuarma). "On it stood the milk churns to be sent to the creamery the following day."
The Rev James Brennan, of Kilkenny, says that he well remembers the stillan in his grandmother's house in Graine, Urlingford. "It was a cold room with shelves on which large pans of milk were kept, as were buckets of water and anything that had to be kept cool."
Thanks to those who wrote to remind me that Irish has borrowed the word as stillin, especially to a wretch who signed her letter Martina.
"I'm worried about you," she says. "You need to eat more fish and to down a few more taoscans every night. Your brain needs nurture and lubrication. You explained this word stillin to us in UCD in the 1980s, you know, and told us that it came from stell, with ing added to make a noun of it, just as you told Mr Colfer."
James Hannon, from Larne, asks about the word fecket. It is a word he has heard many times in Scotland. Fecket is a vest, or a simmet, to use the Ulster word.
Burns has: "Grim loon! he gat me by the fecket" in his Poem to Mr Mitchell. A fir fecket was, and probably still is, a coffin in Burns country. Origin unknown.
Fecket has not, apparently, been recorded in Ulster. Simmet is very common. This seems to be used only of a man's vest, or a baby's. A Scots word, it may have come directly from Old French samit, a silk undergarment.
Another French import that has since travelled the world from Scotland is caddie. From cadet, the youngest son, caddies were once sent by the noble families of Scotland to serve as attendants in other great houses.
The lady who wrote this never played golf: "Where will I get a little foot-page, Where will I get a caddie, That will run swift to bonnie Aboyne, Wi' a letter to my rantin' laddie?'
Thanks to Deasun Breatnach, of Dun Laoghaire, for his suggestion that hoity-toity, as well as the Scots and Ulster word howtowdy, may be traced to Old French huteaudeau, a pullet.