Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Woundrous Words Wednesday


Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Bermuda Onion where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. If you want to play along, grab the button, write a post and come back and add your link to Mr. Linky! 



I'm read City of Bohane by Kevin Barry recently .
It is an Irish book so there are many slang expressions used in it. I had to resort to Slang.ie as well as the dictionary to find definitions for these words.

abseil - "He noted a spider absail from the top of the door's frame, enjoyed its measured, shelving fall, thought it was late enough in the year for that fella, being October, the city all brown-mooded."
(from Merriam-Webster)
intransitive verb - chiefly British: rappel
First Known Use: 1941
Rhymes with ABSEIL
airmail, all hail, assail, avail, bake sale


gaatch - "He liked the gaatch of this gingery kid - even if he couldn't tell exactly what it was that made him smile (it was the dense, packed menace) and he said..."
(from Slang.ie)
Behaving in a silly manner.

dreck - "The lardy-boy off the Rises wobbled along the wynds of the Trace and headed for the 98 Steps on the dreck afternoon of a winter's day."
trash, rubbish
Origin of DRECK
Yiddish drek & German Dreck, from Middle High German drec; akin to Old English threax rubbish
Rhymes with DRECK
beck, Cech, check, Czech

scobe - Close-up: what looked like a Cusack-McGroarty crossbreed - the hunchback Grimes squinted - giving the come-on to the Stanners kid directly, with his eyes rancid and herbshot, a scrunchy look to him, a classic Norrie scobe."
(from Wikitionary)
(Ireland, slang) a delinquent.




6 comments:

  1. This post reminds me that I've been meaning to keep a book of new to me words but I haven't started yet.

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  2. I knew dreck for some reason but the rest are new to me. The Irish sure do use some interesting words!

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  3. Thanks for sharing these interesting Irish words.

    http://tributebooksmama.blogspot.com/2012/06/wondrous-words-wednesday_20.html

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  4. All new to me except dreck...not sure where I knew dreck from - LOL! Have you read, "In the Company of Others" by Jan Karon? It is set in a B&B in Ireland - really good book!

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  5. Abseil is not new to me but the Irish slang words were, very interesting.

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