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ENGLISH AS WE SPEAK IT IN IRELAND.
[CH. XIII
- Pookeen; a play—blindman's buff: from Irish púic, a veil or covering, from the covering put over the eyes. Pookeen is also applied in Cork to a cloth muzzle tied on calves or lambs to prevent sucking the mother. The face-covering for blindman's buff is called pookoge, in which the dim. óg is used instead of ín or een. The old-fashioned coal-scuttle bonnets of long ago that nearly covered the face were often called pookeen bonnets. It was of a bonnet of this kind that the young man in Lover's song of 'Molly Carew' speaks:—
- Oh, lave off that bonnet or else I'll lave on it
- The loss of my wandering sowl:—
- because it hid Molly's face from him.
- Poor mouth; making the poor mouth is trying to persuade people you are very poor—making out or pretending that you are poor.
- Poor scholars, 151, 157.
- Poreens; very small potatoes—mere crachauns (which see)—any small things, such as marbles, &c. (South: porrans in Ulster.)
- Porter-meal: oatmeal mixed with porter. Seventy or eighty years ago, the carters who carried bags of oatmeal from Limerick to Cork (a two-day journey) usually rested for the night at Mick Lynch's public-house in Glenosheen. They often took lunch or dinner of porter-meal in this way:—Opening the end of one of the bags, the man made a hollow in the oatmeal into which he poured a quart of porter, stirring it up with a spoon: then he ate an immense bellyful of the mixture. But those fellows could digest like an ostrich.
