Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/193

 178 there still. The custom is recognised in the present-day land courts, with some modifications in the classification—as Mr. Maurice Healy informs me in an interesting and valuable communication—the collop being still the unit—and constantly referred to by the lawyers in the conduct of cases. So the old Brehon Law process has existed continuously from old times, and is repeated by the lawyers of our own day; and its memory is preserved in the word collop. (See my 'Smaller Soc. Hist. of Anc. Ireland,' p. 431.)

In pagan times the religion of Ireland was Druidism, which was taught by the druids: and far off as the time is the name of these druids still exists in our popular speech. The Irish name for a druid is drui [dree]; and in the South any crabbed cunning old-fashioned-looking little boy is called—even by speakers of English—a shoundree, which exactly represents in sound the Irish sean-drui, old druid; from sean [shoun or shan], old. (See 'Irish Names of Places,' I. 98.)

There are two words much in use in Munster, of which the phonetic representations are thoothach or thoohagh and hóchan (ó long), which tell a tale of remote times. A thoothach or thoohagh is an ignorant unmannerly clownish fellow: and hóchan means much the same thing, except that it is rather lower in the sense of ignorance or uncouthness. Passing through the Liberties of Dublin I once heard a woman—evidently from Limerick—call a man a dirty hóchan. Both words are derived from tuath [thooa], a layman, as distinguished from a cleric or a man of learning. The Irish form of the first is tuathtach: of the second thuathcháin (vocative). Both are a memory of the