Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/114

 CH. VII.] ’ighlands or The Brave Old Hoak.’ (Washington Irving.)

Squeeze is pronounced squeedge and crush scroodge in Donegal and elsewhere; but corruptions like these are found among the English peasantry—as may be seen in Dickens.

'You had better rinsh that glass' is heard everywhere in Ireland: an old English survival; for Shakespeare and Lovelace have renched for rinced (Lowell): which with the Irish sound of short e before n gives us our word rinshed.

Such words as old, cold, hold are pronounced by the Irish people ould, cowld, hould (or howlt); gold is sounded goold and ford foord. I once heard an old Wicklow woman say of some very rich people 'why these people could ait goold.' These are all survivals of the old English way of pronouncing such words. In the State Papers of Elizabeth's time you will constantly meet with such words as hoult and stronghowlt (hold and stronghold.) In my boyhood days I knew a great large sinewy active woman who lived up in the mountain gap, and who was universally known as 'Thunder the cowlt from Poulaflaikeen' (cowlt for colt); Poulaflaikeen, the high pass between Glenosheen and Glenanaar, Co. Limerick, for which see Dr. R. D. Joyce's 'Ballads of Irish Chivalry,' pp. 102, 103, 120.

Old Tom Howlett, a Dublin job gardener, speaking to me of the management of fruit trees, recommended the use of butchers' waste. 'Ah sir'—said he, with a luscious roll in his voice as if he had been licking his lips—'Ah sir, there's nothing for the roots of an apple tree like a big tub of fine rotten ould guts.'