Mind your language
IT BEING unseasonably warm on Sun- day, I had tea in the garden. A bird, commendably busy fetching bits of twig for a nest, had just dropped a congealed lump of dead leaf and attachments straight into my cup, and I was wonder- ing if it was worth going back into the house to fetch some fresh, when my husband said, 'I don't understand all this stuff about are and sind. Why don't you try the Notes and Queries tack again?'
So I did go back to the kitchen, where I found a letter from Dr T.H. Hugh- Davies wondering about the word doul in a specific sense.
The good doctor was looking through some letters from a nurse in training at St Thomas's in 1936 to her father, a small tenant farmer in Shropshire. She wrote about a baby which she was preparing for a surgeon to get to work on, and she 'had to hold the baby in the right position for him, and generally act as his doul'. And then, referring to a colleague who had already gained nurs- ing experience, she wrote: 'It must be terribly hard in a way to begin again at the very bottom, and be douled about by people who don't know quarter as much.'
What, then, is this word doul in its double application? Can it, Dr Hugh- Davies asks, be derived from the Greek douleia, 'servitude'? On balance, I should think not, though doctors do pick up bits of Greek in their medical lexicon.
Nor yet would it seem to come from any of the words normally spelled dole — either 'sorrow', 'charity' or 'to thin leather for gloves' (from Latin dolare, `to plane').
Joseph Wright's Dialect Dictionary has douled meaning 'wearied', but, besides being recorded only in the region of Yorkshire, it seems not to have exactly the meaning we seek. But then there is another word that Wright does record from Shropshire, dowl, which means 'to knead or mix up bread, dough etc., in a hurry'. It is regarded as obsolete (in 1900), and the illustrative quotation is: `We bin getting short o bread, I see; I mun dowl up a pot-cake for tay.'
Could dowl have had its range extend- ed from the kneading-trough to the operating theatre? Or does any reader know where I should have looked for the answer to this?
Anyway, my second cup was delicious, even without any pot-cake.
Dot Wordsworth
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