`What exactly is a gobaloon?', asks Mary O'Connor of Waterford city. `The reason I ask is that here a gobaloon is a class of gom, a harmless fellow for all that, and you should note that there are no female gobaloons among us. To friends of ours from near Loughrea, Co Galway, the word means a dunderhead. But back in West Waterford a gobaloon is something else entirely: a thieving class of a sleeveen. Is gobaloon a corruption of some Irish word, itself from the Norman French?
I don't think it is, although the -oon ending seems to indicate a Norman connection. (Consider bosthoon, Irish bastun, originally Norman French baston, a stick, etc etc). I think the word's origin is French all right, but modern: gobe-a-l`eau, one who seizes (anything) on the water. This has come into the dialects of southern England as gobbalew, a coastgoard in Hampshire, an exciseman in Devon and Cornwall: and because people who followed those occupations weren't exactly popular in the old days, the term gained currency as a generic one for anybody thoroughly disapproved of.
Jane Crane of Dunlewy, Co Donegal, sends me a word she heard used by a man who spent many years working in Scotland. This old man remarked: `isn't it an immis kind of a day' when he meant that the day was changeable. Immis is sometimes found as emmis or eemis. Of land, or of seed, the word means variable in its productive results. It can also mean rickety, so that you may still hear in Burn's country, `That auld ladder is eemis.' From the Old Norse ymiss, various, alternate, it survives in Swedish as ymsa, to change.
Dermot O'Neill writes from Rathfarnbham about the often misused protagonist. The Greek for `to bring' was agein, and so agon meant a bringing together of people, particularly for a meeting such as the Olympic games. From this they derived agonistes, a competitor. The fiercely competitive world of Greek drama borrowed the word and an actor also came to be known as agonistes. In the early dramas there was only one actor and a chorus: when a second was added the words protos and deuteros, first and second, were combined to make protagonistes and deuteragonistes. A protagonist is therefore the principal character, and there cannot be two of them. And he is not, as is often thought, a champion or an advocate.