"A NOUN common enough in Antrim where I grew up was looby," writes a Greystones woman who wants to remain anonymous. "Not loopy," she emphasises, "although used as an adjective it meant the same thing or near enough to it. A looby was a fool, an amadhaun; a looby person wasn't the full shilling. My husband thinks that this word comes from the Irish lub, a twist, knot. Is he right?'
No. A good old word it is, though. Piers Plowman has it (1377): "Grete lobyes and longe that lothe were to swynke". (To swynke was to work hard). The Dublinman, Stanyhurst, in his Description of Ireland (late 16th century) has: "Sir you take me short, as long and as verie a lowbie as you imagine to make me". As to its origin, there seems to be general agreement that the word is Germanic. There are many Teutonic words denoting clumsiness, and they live in the Danish lobbes, a clown, bumpkin and in the Norwegian lub, lubba, a small, very corpulent person. Related, too, to the modern English lubber.
Kate O'Sullivan is 10. She asks me not to say where she lives, because, she says, her friends would give her a hard time for asking where the word nightmare comes from. Her mother told her to write to me. Kate also wants to know if there's such a word as daymare.
About 800 years ago, Kate, people believed that a nasty little goblin, called mare or maer in Old English, used to sit on people at night and bounce up and down on them while they slept, trying either to suffocate them or to give them frightening dreams. The word mare came to England, and to Ireland, from Germany and Scandinavia. It travelled far. The Norwegians called the goblin mara, the Poles zmora; and the French invented the word couchemar for nightmare.
Coucher means to trample. You are a bit young yet to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written over 600 years ago, because the English is a bit hard for one thing; but there is a prayer in one of the stories which is nice: "Jesu Criste, and Seint Benedight, Bless this house fro the nighte-mare". Terrible speller, wasn't he?
There is no such word as day-mare, Kate, as far as I know. Maybe there should be. Anyway, thanks for the nice letter and for the two kisses. Here are three in return - X X X - from your friend.