The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #53016 Message #3379491
Posted By: MGM·Lion
21-Jul-12 - 03:17 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Fields of Greenmore
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Fields of Greenmore
"Does anyone have evidence on how common the word 'coil', in the sense used by M G-M, would be in the common English usage of the Armagh/Tyrone area?" asks John Moulden above.
I find this on an earlier thread:~
Subject: Tune Add: HARE OF KILGRAIN
From: Malcolm Douglas - PM
Date: 26 Apr 03 - 11:41 AM
The text in Sam Henry's Songs of the People (University of Georgia Press, 1990, p.31) is a collation from three unidentified sources; one presumably would be William Sloan of Dundooan (formerly Bushmills) who provided the tune. Henry's notes attribute authorship of the song to James Sloan of Topland, Ballyrock, c.1770, and further comment:
"An 18th-century hunting song supposed to have been written by the hare... The song must have been written about 1770. Its author['s]... great grandchildren are still in the district."
The OED gives usages of "coil" in sense of fuss or tumult up to Charles Reade's The Cloister & The Hearth [1861] ~~ so word still current nearly 100 years after Henry's speculation as to date of composition of the Greenmore song. All very well for dictionaries to call 'coil' archaic in this sense: if still in current use in mid-C19, hardly an 'archaism' in sense that eg 'yclept' & 'gadzooks' are, is it? And if still current in 1770, then why not in Armagh/Tyrone as much as anywhere else?
~M~