Inside Track: Dundalkisms you don’t hear nowadays

A reader had his interest piqued when he came across the word ‘odgins’ in a recent Inside Track piece. It had been used in the context of someone getting a head start in a race, or having an advantage.

He didn’t bother looking it up on Google, or in his well-thumbed Oxford Dictionary, because, like me, he was satisfied it was a makey-up word, both of us sharing the opinion it was common only to Dundalk.

READ NEXT: Bellurgan United U14's advance in SFAI National Cup

He was happy with the spelling, as I was when I committed it to print. But, in the words of the late Government Minister, Brian Lenihan, senior, on ‘mature reflection’, I think because of the way it was/is pronounced there should be another ‘d’, giving us oddgins.

A random thought: There’s a popular local hostelry with the name Mo Chára. Translated, that’s ‘My Friend’. Mo is invariably pronounced ‘moe’, when it should be ‘mu’, as in mu-ch. (That’s your lesson over for this week.)

Back to our correspondent. He was satisfied there were other words that can be attributed to Dundalk, and offered as examples, ‘pug’, ‘blarge’, and ‘gutties’.

Pug, which I can safely say WAS the word used for a football – it hasn’t been heard in years.

It was in the days when a football was made of leather, and while it could fly through the air in fine weather, fit to be kicked prodigious distances, when it was wet, you had a poor chance of catching it if you weren’t wearing thick woollen gloves; many were the fingers that were put out of joint or maybe even broken.

If a player had no finesse about him, he would blarge the ball, usually out of defence and with the toe of his boot.

It was the alternative to passing to a colleague with a deft side-footer. (Come to think of it, there’d be no room for a blarger in today’s game, unless he could pick out a team-mate at 70 yards.)

We wore gutties, but usually only for running. They were white and light, made of something like felt.

When they got dirty, we’d spruce them up with white stuff – what exactly, I don’t know, but it was something like whitewash. They were no good for football. You wouldn’t be able to blarge the ball, or ‘lorry’ it.

Lorry, that was a first-cousin of blarge, and might just have had currency beyond Dundalk. I would have heard it used when the county team was playing. But ‘Give Her Wiggan’, belonging to the same family as blarge and lorry, was exclusively the town’s.

Two chaps well-known in the Clan na Gael club in years gone by, Mal King and Barney Joe Grimes, were part of a group that owned a greyhound by that name. They collected on a few occasions.

‘Larriers’ weren’t confined to the football pitch. Many who walked the streets could be called one, though it didn’t put them in the criminal bracket. They might just have been disliked by someone, or did something small wrong.

I was on here before about this one, ‘hooks’. Having made several inquiries in the meantime, I am satisfied that here is another sporting colloquialism. It was from the game of snooker.

If you had no clear view of a ball you wanted to play, you were said to be hooked. And if you were a mile behind, you would be looking for a number of hooks to get yourself backed into the game.

No such word, seemingly. It’s snookers, and if you find yourself in a situation described above, you’re snookered, which, come to think of it, is an expression used away from the green baize.

Thanks to our correspondent for helping to fill a space that would have been otherwise blank.