Poke
An ice-cream cone - the conical wafer plus the scoop or scoops of ice cream on top. Also (older) a bag or sack, in the sense preserved in the English idiom 'a pig in a poke'. In Ulster the ice-cream sense is the dominant one in modern speech.
Etymology
From Middle English 'poke' meaning bag, sack, or pouch, ultimately from Old North French 'poque'. Documented in Older Scots from before 1375. The bag sense - what you carried groceries in - persists in older Ulster speech and in the English idiom 'a pig in a poke' (= a thing bought sight unseen, in its bag). The ice-cream sense developed when paper-cones full of soft-serve became the standard summer treat: the cone is a small paper bag, hence a poke.
In a sentence
"Two pokes please - one for me and a 99 for the wee one."
Historical notes
Poke is one of the cleanest pieces of Hiberno-English/Ulster Scots usage where the older sense (bag) and the newer sense (ice-cream cone) coexist without confusing each other. A Belfast speaker asking for 'a poke' in summer means ice cream; a Belfast speaker handing over groceries 'in a poke' means a paper bag. The construction 'a 99 poke' (= a soft-serve cone with a Cadbury Flake stuck in it) is a fixed Ulster summer phrase.
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry POKE n. · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary