Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/346




 * Sough; a whistling or sighing noise like that of the wind through trees. 'Keep a calm sough' means keep quiet, keep silence. (Ulster.)


 * Soulth; 'a formless luminous apparition.' (W. B. Yeats.) Irish samhailt [soulth], a ghost, an apparition; lit. a 'likeness,' from samhai [sowel], like.


 * Sources of Anglo-Irish Dialect, 1.


 * Sowans, sowens; a sort of flummery or gruel usually made and eaten on Hallow Eve. Very general in Ulster and Scotland; merely the Irish word samhain, the first of November; for Hallow Eve is really a November feast, as being the eve of the first of that month. In old times in Ireland, the evening went with the coming night.


 * Spalpeen. Spalpeens were labouring men—reapers, mowers, potato-diggers, &c.—who travelled about in the autumn seeking employment from the farmers, each with his spade, or his scythe, or his reaping-hook. They congregated in the towns on market and fair days, where the farmers of the surrounding districts came to hire them. Each farmer brought home his own men, fed them on good potatoes and milk, and sent them to sleep in the barn on dry straw—a bed—as one of them said to me—'a bed fit for a lord, let alone a spalpeen.' The word spalpeen is now used in the sense of a low rascal. Irish spailpín, same sound and meaning. (See my 'Old Irish Folk Music and Songs,' p. 216; and for the Ulster term see Rabble above.)


 * Spaug; a big clumsy foot:—'You put your ugly spaug down on my handkerchief.' Irish spág, same sound and sense.