m
A NATIVE OF Sunderland; a supporter of Sunderland Association Football Club (northern England)
The origin of mackem remains obscure, but there are many popular myths about it, which are worth the retelling. One belief is that it was a term used by shipyard workers in the nineteenth century on the Tyne to describe those who lived in Wearside. The Geordies from Tyneside would take to be fitted the ships made in Sunderland, hence the phrase mack’em and tack’em (‘make them and take them’). A centenary programme from the Sunderland Cricket and Rubgy Football Club in 1973 carries the slogan ‘We still tak’em and mak’em and you cannot whack’em.’ Some also maintain that mackem is a reference to the Second World War, when the Wear was a major supplier of ships, giving birth to the phrase ‘we mackem and they sink em’.
The term is not popular with everyone. Some see it as a label of insult, used particularly by Newcastle United fans when claiming superiority over Sunderland United. The two cities have a history of rivalry beyond the football pitch, dating back to the early stages of the Civil War when Newcastle became a Royalist city and Sunderland, partly influenced by its large contingent of Scottish traders, supported the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell. Whatever its origin, mackem is likely to remain contentious. While some wear the term with pride, for others it is the ultimate put-down born of a rivalry that is centuries old.
happy (Ireland and Liverpool)
First recorded in Ireland around the end of the Second World War, made up made its way to Liverpool, the city often referred to as the unofficial capital of Ireland. From Liverpool it began to pass to more general use largely through the influence of TV. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an ITN interview with Ringo Starr on his wedding in 1965, in which he tells us that John and George were made up, only to add a quick explanation that ‘they’re happy’. No such explanation would be needed now, as the word has spread out from Liverpool and gained a good foothold in general use.
tired out, exhausted (South Midlands)
Maggled is to be found in a string of counties from Worcestershire right through Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire to Berkshire. The verb maggle is probably a variant of mangle and is recorded with the meanings of ‘maul, maim, lacerate’ from the early fifteenth century. Magged has been recorded in Bedfordshire in the same sense. Razzored (from razored), from Derbyshire, is probably a parallel formation, the idea being of falling to bits through exhaustion.
See ALL PAGGERED AND POOTLED, and also BLETHERED, BUSHWHA, DIRT DEEN, JIGGERED, LAMPERED, WABBIT
grandmother (London and UK-wide)
This Hindi word, meaning ‘mother’ or ‘mother-in-law’, provides an excellent example of a common and longstanding linguistic phenomenon whereby the word for mother is used more generally as a respectful title for older female relatives, especially a grandmother. In this case the shift has happened not in Indian English per se, but in the English of the Indian communities in the Caribbean, in Trinidad and Guyana, where the title is applied both to grandmothers and to older women in general. The word is also now a familiar one in the language of Hinglish: the rich mixture of Hindi and English which is growing rapidly in Britain.
See OH MAI, and GANNY, GRAMMER, NAIN
drunk (Liverpool and Birkenhead)
If you are malleted, you are well and truly drunk, and would probably feel as though hit by a mallet. The term sits alongside mangled, mashed and massacred in Scouse-speak (and beyond), as one of hundreds of euphemisms for ‘flying three sheets to the wind’ (there’s another).
See LIQUID LUNCHES, and also BLOOTERED, DRUCKEN, DRUFFEN, FLUTHERED, PISHED, PUGGLED, SKIMMISHED, STOCIOUS
mother (the North)
Like mam, mammy means ‘mother’, and the English Dialect Dictionary’s first examples for both lie in the Shetland Islands. But mammy has gained less positive overtones through its use for the stereotyped black retainer, straight out of Gone With the Wind, tending her white charges on a slave-run American plantation. A nineteenth-century lexicographer called it a ‘term of tenderness’ and linked it to Romany mami, ‘a grandmother’, but a century later the black writer Zora Neale Hurston dismissed it as ‘a term of insult’.
bread roll (chiefly northern England and Cornwall)
Like barm cake, the manshon is found mainly in the north of England, and also in the South-West (especially Cornwall in this case). It’s unlikely that this means there is some historic, bread-based link between those areas, but rather that they are two of the principal dialect areas outside the South-East, which has historically been the focus of standard English. It is a small loaf, shaped like a bun, but can also describe a muffin or a hot cake.
Manshon appears in the English Dialect Dictionary in many spoken forms, including manchent, manchun, manshen, manshun, manshut and mansion. Its most likely background lies in the Norman French word manchette, which literally meant a ‘double-cuff or oversleeve’ (in modern French it means a ‘headline’), but which was also used to describe a ring-shaped cake of bread. There is, however, an alternative theory, based not on the look of the loaf, but on the quality of flour it required. Such flour would be sifted through some kind of a narrow bag, which in French was a manche, literally a sleeve or strainer used for the filtering of that high-grade flour to deliver ‘wheat bread of the finest quality’.
By the end of the fifteenth century, a manshon was already being used to refer to fine bread rolls (Edward IV is recorded as eating them for breakfast), making it the only word to refer specifically to a bread roll before roll did.
See OUR DAILY BREAD, and also BAP, BARM CAKE, BUTTY, COB, NUBBIES, STOTTY
sulky, sullen; spoilt (northern England, particularly Yorkshire, and the Midlands)
If a child is mardy, he or she is over-indulged, or simply badly behaved. In other words they are spoilt, and it is very likely that mardy is in fact a simple variation of marred. To mard a child was to spoil them by indulgence, and a mardy can describe such a child as well as their undesirable behaviour. These attributes are not restricted to children, though, and an adult can be just as mardy – or indeed be a mardy-arse: in other words whining, sulky and moody.
Mardy as a noun first appeared in the 1870s, and as an adjective a few decades later in the early years of the twentieth century. It has remained in favour since, although it became even more popular thanks to the 2006 release of the song ‘Mardy Bum’ by the Brit Award-winning band the Arctic Monkeys, featuring the lines:
‘Well now then Mardy Bum
Oh I’m in trouble again, aren’t I
I thought as much
Cause you turned over there
Pulling that silent disappointment face
The one that I can’t bear.’
On a similar theme, mardy-arse denotes a spoilt brat.
If marred is the generally accepted root of mardy, there are other suggestions too, including one that links mard to French merde, ‘excrement’. Both Derbyshire and Lincolnshire possess the noun mardo, used of excrement when talking to very small children. If this theory is correct, then mardy-bum and mardy-arse, usually used to tease some hapless youngster, carry the strongly implied suggestion that the person in question is still in nappies.
See THE MARDY BLUES, and also COB ON, TATCHY
Words describing a bad-tempered, fractious person who is prone to sulking once abounded in local dialect, from the standard moody and sulky to the old East Anglian word pensy. Historically, there is a remarkable concentration in the area of the eight counties of the Industrial Revolution (Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire), including humpy, kysty, maungy, nattered, nazzy, neppered and nousty. Alas, most of these words appear to have dwindled over the course of the twentieth century. It is still the case, however, that the most distinctive current regionalisms for moody arise in this region.
See also COB ON, MARDY, TATCHY
friend (Northumberland)
In Northumbrian pits (where the language of ‘Pitmatic’ was born), you may hear marra, short for marrow and originally denoting ‘one of a pair’. Its etymology, sadly, is uncertain, although it may derive from Old English mearu or maro, meaning ‘a companion’, or from Old Icelandic magr, which meant ‘friendly’.
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CATERCOUSIN, CHUCK, CLICK, CREW, HOMIE, MUCKER, SORRY
to brew tea (the North and Midlands)
It may not be the image that springs to mind as the boiling water enters the pot and gently infuses the tea leaves (for the word, like the action, long pre-dates the tea bag) but, according to the English Dialect Dictionary, the word mash, for adding hot water to tea, originally meant ‘to beat violently’, as of course in mashed potatoes. The explanation for the tea usage lies in brewing, for the term also refers to the process of infusing malt in hot water so that the sugars dissolve, hence the wonderful-sounding mash-mundle or mash-mungle, an implement used to stir the malt and water mixture. The ultimate roots of mash may lie in a variety of Scandinavian terms, all of which stress the same brewing context, and may even go back to the German word meischen, meaning ‘to tread grapes’.
Mash was first recorded in relation to tea in the mid-nineteenth century, and became the standard term for brewing tea throughout the North and Midlands, up as far as North Yorkshire, in distinction from the more general brew in the South. It may be significant that the area it covers includes most of England’s principal brewing areas.
See KETTLE’S ON, and also BIRLE, EMPT, HELL, MASK, SCALD, SOAK, TEEM, WET
to brew tea (Scotland and northern England)
Mask is simply a variant of mash, found in the very northern part of England (Cumbria, Northumberland, Durham, the far north of Yorkshire) and in Scotland. The extension of the term from brewing to tea, however, seems to have occurred slightly earlier than with mash. The Oxford English Dictionary records a first date of 1799.
See KETTLE’S ON, and also BIRLE, EMPT, HELL, MASH, SCALD, SOAK, TEEM, WET
April Fool (Lancashire, Cumbria and Yorkshire, now rare)
Not strictly an April Fool, May gosling was a parallel tradition held on 1 May throughout the region for which April noddy is recorded. It is mentioned in the eighteenth century, and the celebrated collectors of children’s rhymes, lona and Peter Opie, found the custom alive and well among schoolchildren in the 1950s. Gosling is recorded as meaning ‘a foolish, inexperienced person’ in Scotland in the early nineteenth century.
See A PINCH AND A PUNCH, and also APRIL GAWBY, APRIL GOWK, APRIL NODDY, FOOL GOWK, HUNTIGOWK
How to talk like … the Welsh
Well, look-you, it depends which Welsh. Now do you mean North Walian, or South Walian, isn’t it? And that’s the question, of course guaranteed to raise hackles in the land of the daffodil and the leek. As are likewise the stereotyped ‘look-you’ inversion and ‘isn’t it’ tag that have all the hallmarks of the mocking imitator. The Welsh have had a hard time of it from the English for centuries – the Welsh language was persecuted and in centuries past schoolchildren heard speaking it were forced to wear a wooden collar, known colloquially as the ‘Welsh-Not’, to deter them from doing so again.
And there’s not a lot of love lost either, it seems, between the north and south of this long country, divided by mountains and deep valleys, with only Offa’s Dyke keeping the English at bay. A South Walian, living in Anglesey, complains, ‘People regularly say “Pakistani, are you?” because my accent is still so South Walian.’ The north, with the greatest concentration of native Welsh speakers, tends to feel threatened by people from the south, whose English constantly runs the risk of overwhelming the old language.
Naturally, too, north and south have very different social traditions. South Wales was for generations the great manufacturing and industrial heart of the country with its ‘vaalleys’ studded with coal mines, now gone, and the vast steelworks of Port Talbot, today shrinking fast. North Wales, apart from slate mining, has a largely rural and farming tradition. And the accents of the country tend to reflect these very different cultural shapes.
So in the south the short vowel ‘a’, as in valleys, is lengthened and back, lamb, accent and so on all sound more like ‘baak’, ‘laam’ and ‘aaksent’. These lengthened sounds work in tandem with the tune of South Walian English, to produce what’s almost always referred to as a sing-song accent, but which more accurately is a combination of lengthened vowels, heavy syllabic stress and many elided syllables (even between words) to produce marked rhythms and an almost melodic rise and fall. ‘He juss TAD ti CHEInge is AAKsent, an’ issAD’ (‘He just had to change his accent and it’s sad’) said one South Walian of her son who’d been bullied by classmates for speaking with a strong accent. Note how the ‘t’ of just has elided with had (‘juss tad’) and again it’s sad is slurred together becoming ‘issad’. And among the vowels, the ‘ay’ long vowel has a dash of ‘ee’ in it: change is ‘cheinge’ and under this regime, the country itself is pronounced as ‘Weels’.
The open ‘o’ vowel of know, toe and go is regularly pronounced in South Wales as an ‘aw’ sound; so one stubs one’s ‘taw’ and ‘gaws’ to the doctor to have her examine it; meanwhile I don’t know becomes something like ‘Adawnaw’.
There’s a tendency to pronounce the -ing at the end of present participles and gerunds as ‘en’ so saying and going become ‘sayen’ and ‘goen’. And (classic lampoon fodder this) the ‘h’ in word-primary position (here, hearing) doesn’t simply disappear as so often in British dialects (notably in the South-West), but transforms itself into a ‘y’ sound. Here is ‘yer’ (leading to the mocking over-use by imitators of expressions like ‘down by yer’), and ‘yerring’ is hearing: ‘AdinYER’ is the response of someone who failed to catch what they’d been asked. Just to complicate matters, one’s hearing apparatus sounds here identical, leading to such indignant phrases as ‘Cant yer? Yuse yer yers, boyo!’
As with Gaelic speakers in Scotland, those whose native tongue is the distantly related Celtic language of Welsh have a much softer, more sibilant sound to the English they speak, which produces a sort of lisping effect when using words like pity which becomes ‘pitsi’. Alongside this is the tendency of these first-language Welsh speakers to de-voice consonants where in standard English they would be voiced, or hard. So ‘g’ is de-voiced to ‘k’ and ‘d’ to ‘t’. Lamented one elderly North Walian about the threats to her native Welsh language: ‘I like them to keep the Welsh language koin’. I think itss a pitsi to lets it ko.’
As in the south, there is a rise and fall in the tune of North Walian, but it’s a more staccato sound, with less of the flowing up-and-down rhythm of southern speakers. The north is also a ‘rhotic’ area, so the ‘r’ in a phrase like ‘awuR (our) grandparents’ is audible, while in South Wales, there is no r-sounding.
While the long north–south border with England is quite marked in terms of accent, that around the eastern extremity of North Wales in Flint, on the Welsh side of the Mersey estuary, shows considerable overlap. Here the Welsh takes on a decided tinge of Merseyside with trailing word-ends and added sibilance. As one local said, ‘I’ve been taken for a Scouser: very often the people say, “You’re proper Scouse, Man! You’re not Welsh.”’
Duw (God) man! It’s pickin’ (beginning) to rain. Twti down (crouch) and fetch the daps (plimsolls) in. My gwennie (trendy young woman)’s just gone up the gwli (alley) to buy some loshins (sweets) and forgotten to keep the dishes (put them away), isn’t it [standard tag-word]. Her nain (grandmother) will be furious as she’s a tidy (decent) soul. Yachy da! (goodbye!).
SIMON ELMES
giddy, dizzy (the North-West)
Mazy is a fairly straightforward image of confusion (‘like a maze’) found in English since the beginning of the sixteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth, it had become most prominently a Lancashire word. Unsurprisingly, however, it is also recorded in neighbouring counties, Cheshire, West Yorkshire and north-west Derbyshire, as well as in nearby Staffordshire.
See GOING SWIMMINGLY, and also REEZIE, SWIMY
food; nourishment (in pockets across the UK including Shetland and Scotland)
Meat is food. It was quite literally that because, prior to the fourteenth century when meat began referring specifically to the flesh of animals that had been killed and which had been subjected to some form of cooking – in contrast to the bones and other inedible parts – meat was defined as any kind of food, both for people and, indeed, as fodder for animals. In other words it meant solid food generically, as opposed to drink, as well as an article of food or a dish of food. It could also be a meal or, more elaborately, a feast, and as such could signify the principal meal of the day. So the phrase at meat and meal means ‘at the table’ or ‘during a meal’, and after or before meat refers to the meal, not a course. To go to meat was in days gone by to sit down to eat, even if the food was fish.
The root of meat lies in a variety of Celtic languages, but beyond that its root is a little hazy. The best guess is some kind of link to Latin madere, ‘to be wet, succulent or fat’.
a centipede (Ireland, Northern England and Scotland)
This alliterative term for a child’s favourite insect has many local alternatives, including Meggy-Mony-Legs in Scotland and Meggy-Monyfeet in Northumberland. A spider’s web, meanwhile, is known in the same parts as Meggie-lickie-spinnie.
boisterous, noisy antics (Wiltshire)
Also known as Meg’s Delight (though why they should belong only to Meg is a mystery), Meg’s Diversions was a term first recorded in the army in the early 1800s, where it described frivolous fun to be had when off-duty.
shopping (Scotland, Ireland and in Caribbean English)
A message began life, in the 1300s, as the business of carrying or delivering a communication; a mission. From there it took on the general sense of going out and running an errand, with no transmission of a message being required. And so doing the messages became doing the shopping, where it has settled to this day.
dung heap (Yorkshire)
A midden has been a dung heap since the 1400s, and it survives in Yorkshire to this day. In fact the word was around even before that in Old English, and can be found in the ninth-century Lindisfarne Gospels. It lies behind such place names as Northumberland’s Blacmyddingmore (now Blackmiddingmoor). There are numerous midden compounds, including the wonderfully alliterative midden mavis, a woman who collects rags and rubbish (restricted to Scotland and now, sadly, largely obsolete). Elsewhere, midden is used across Britain in archaeological contexts, where it denotes a prehistoric refuse heap marking an ancient settlement, consisting chiefly of shells and bones and often also discarded artefacts. The word is, fittingly, a mixture of two Scandinavian terms meaning ‘muck’ and ‘dung’.
ugly; rubbish (UK-wide and particularly Scotland)
For a dialect word that began life meaning ‘a mixture’, minging has done spectacularly well, having become one of the most popular of the put-downs currently on offer. Literally it means ‘stinking’, but the focus of its use may be just as much emotionally unappealing as actually smelly. The word comes from ming, which is Scottish for stink (and, in the past, excrement), and thus the minger or minga is the literal equivalent of the rather old-fashioned English stinker. While the Scots verb has been around for many years, minger, minging and the rest came south in the 1970s, and have become increasingly widely used. Rab C. Nesbitt captures most of the range of meanings pretty succinctly: ‘Thae weans are the fruit of my loins. Awright my loins might be minging and the fruit a bit bruised aboot the extremities, but I brought thae boys into this world.’
As well as a derogative, minging can also mean ‘drunk’. The suggestion of a nasty smell, of course, is always there.
See THE MIRROR CRACKED, and also BUTTERS, DUFFY, FUSTY, LAIDLY, MUNTER, OBZOCKY, RANK, SKANK
to play truant (the South-West, Wales and Ireland)
Mitching comes from an Anglo-Norman term for hiding or concealing oneself, and first took on the meaning of ‘absenting oneself from authority’ in the late 1500s. In 1672, the author and physician Henry Stubbe was writing about ‘truant children, who forsook their school, to go mitching after black-berries’. Francis Grose, meanwhile, has it in his Provincial Glossary of 1796 that mitch meant ‘to slink, slouch, prowl about, idle about’, and hence a mitchin was a sly, skulking, mischievous boy and a micher or michard an idler, loafer and a truant. But mitch is certainly the earliest established synonym for playing truant; by the nineteenth century, its use was distinctively found in the South-West and South Wales, and later Ireland. Father Ted, for example, said that he ‘mitched off to see a Dana concert’. A variant in Wales is mitsian. Interestingly, Francis Grose also defined mooching as playing truant, with the specific aim on the part of the children of picking blackberries. There is in fact very likely to be a close link in the origins of mooching and mitching.
See BUNKING AND PLUNKING, and also BUNK OFF, DOG, NICK OFF, PLAY HOOKEY, PLUNK, SAG, SKIDGE, SKIVE, TWAG, WAG
to worry, fret, make a fuss or moan (northern England and the Midlands)
The root of mither is probably a development of moither or moider, meaning ‘to confuse, perplex or bewilder’, as well as ‘to worry, fatigue or bother’. To be moithered is to be overcome or stupid with heat or drink, while the adjective moithering can also mean delirious or bewildered. The origin of all terms, for all their emphatic force, is unknown. Perhaps the most likely candidate is maythering, a word that describes talking like an imbecile, although the Irish word modartha, meaning ‘dark’, ‘musky’ or ‘morose’, is another possibility.
light rain, drizzle (chiefly the North and Midlands)
Mizzle is a word of Dutch and north German origin that was first recorded in English in the middle of the fifteenth century. For centuries, it seemed to have no regional affiliation and was used by numerous canonical authors, including Spenser, Swift and Austen. Over the past two centuries, however, the word has become mostly restricted to the North and Midlands and also to the South-West. Interestingly, the word also remains common in the American South. It may come from a Dutch word mysel, but whatever its origins its alliterative association with drizzle is unmistakable, as is its wonderful sound.
See DON’T TALK DRIZZLE, and also BANGE, HADDER, SMIRR
the European mole (Scotland and northern England)
A compound of the Germanic words mould and warp, and literally meaning ‘earth-thrower’, moldwarp is a name used in the northern UK for the much maligned mole. Cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as far back as 1325, this term is most commonly used in Scotland. In 1595, Spenser wrote in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, ‘They … drownded lie in pleasures wastefull well, In which like Moldwarps nousling still they lurke.’
to hit or whack (Wales, the Midlands and northern England)
Mollycrush or mullicrush means, depending on the context, ‘to beat to a jelly’, ‘to pulverise’, ‘to bruise’ and, in figurative uses, ‘to hector or domineer’. Although the molly part might be seen as linking to the use of that word for a girl, and the stereotyping of females as weaklings, the greater likelihood is that the verb derives from the word mull, describing something that has been reduced to minuscule particles.
See A TWANK AND A WALLOP, and also BENSIL, THRAPE, TWANK
a native of Wiltshire (south-west England)
The Swiss lexicographer Francis Grose, best remembered for his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, tells in another important work, his Provincial Glossary, the legend of Wiltshire ‘moon-rakers’, ‘rusticks who, seeing the figure of the moon in the pond, tried to rake it out’. Today’s moonrakers would dispute that strongly, and counter with the alternative story that the men were in fact raking a pond for kegs of smuggled brandy. When they were caught, they managed to fool the revenue men by feigning madness, pretending to be raking the water in order to find the moon.
More prosaically, but rather more plausibly perhaps, a moonraker is also a high sail, set about the sky sail: so high, in fact, that it appears to be touching the moon. Few, however, would prefer this over the romance of the smugglers and their passion for brandy.
money (Lincolnshire; now obsolete)
Although there seems to be only a single recorded instance, morgs is the best example of a genuinely regional piece of slang meaning ‘money’. The isolated example comes from the complaint of a Lincolnshire man at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘He has plenty of morgs. He owes me morgs.’ Its etymology is not known.
See MONEY TALKS – OR DOES IT?, and also ACKERS, GELT, REVITS, SPONDULICKS
Most European languages have a vast and vivid array of informal and slang words for money, and English accepts second place to no language in the vastness and vividness with which it denotes cash, ackers, dosh, wallop, spondulicks, bread, cabbage, and so on. Although all of these words except cash (from the sixteenth century) are pretty recent, they merely replaced another list of words from an earlier era, like blunt, crap, gingerbread or rhino. In spite of, or maybe even because of, this host of informal terms, there is alas no great history of regionally specific words that just mean ‘money’. Where regional terms for money have been recorded, they are normally used to describe particular sorts of money that have some local significance. For example, kaird turner was once used in Scotland to denote small coins made from base metals by tinkers, and in Northumberland and Cumbria ball-money was money demanded at the church gates from the bridegroom and other men in a wedding party as a contribution towards parish funds (originally to buy a football for the parish!).
Beyond that, the predominant regional words for money are very often some of the older slang words from centuries ago, simply because so many of them arose within the London area as the code of criminals, tinkers, and other people living on the margins of society.
See also ACKERS, GELT, MORGS, REVITS, SPONDULICKS
a woman; a harlot (Cumberland)
The official origin of mort, meaning ‘a woman’, is unknown. However, the fairly frequent linking of women to fish through the ages (for coarsely stereotypical reasons) makes it at least possible that the word comes from mort, a ‘young salmon’. However it may also be linked to one of two Welsh words: modryb, ‘a matron’, or morwyn, ‘a virgin’. In criminal slang, where mort was once one of the best-known terms for a girl, you could find such compounds as mort dell, an unmarried woman or virgin girl who accompanies an itinerant villain or beggar, and mort wap-apace, an experienced prostitute or sexually active woman. In this case she was characterised by wap, which meant ‘to have sex’, and apace, ‘speedily’.
The lexicon of terms for women is full of words such as mort which have both ‘virgin’ or ‘harlot’ as their potential meanings. Housewife and hussy both originally meant the same thing – ‘a mistress of the house’ – before going in their two respective, and extreme, directions.
friend (UK-wide but particularly Northern Ireland and the Black Country)
In Northern Ireland and the Black Country, the word mucker has undergone many shifts of register, from negative to positive. Its earliest meanings were literal ones: first recorded in the thirteenth century, it referred to a cleaner of stables who removed dung, and could also denote a person who prepared soil for planting. In the early 1800s it started to be used to describe someone who bungled things and who was therefore incompetent. This sense of contempt was strengthened when mucker took on, in nineteenth-century America, the sense of ‘a troublesome or rowdy person’. It also, in American university slang, denoted a townie.
It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that mucker began to take on positive connotations, first within British military circles and then more widely. It denoted ‘a close companion or friend’, with whom you regularly socialised or ‘mucked in’ – which originally meant to share rations. It is often used as a form of address – the OED’s first quotation is ‘what’s the griff [news] mucker?’, from a military novel set in the Second World War.
See also BLOOD, BREDREN, BUTTY, CATERCOUSIN, CHUCK, CLICK, CREW, HOMIE, MARRA, SORRY
a mess (Yorkshire)
Mullock, ‘a mess’ in Yorkshire, comes from the word mull, meaning ‘something that has been reduced to small particles’ such as dust, ashes, mould or rubbish. The word is linked to those in a variety of northern European languages such as Dutch mul, meaning ‘mould or dust’, the German Müll, ‘rubbish’, and Old Icelandic moli, a ‘crumb’. The first recorded use of mullock seems to be in 1199, where it appears as the surname of one Jordanus Mulloc, who might well have been a contemporary dustman.
Other than its regional use, mullock can mean ‘a worthless, foolish individual’ and, in the Antipodean goldfields, is a rock which does not contain gold, or alternatively the refuse from which gold has already been extracted. The phrase to poke mullock (at) means ‘to ridicule or make fun of someone’, as in Donald Stuart’s novel I Think I’ll Live, set in the prisoner of war camps in Java, ‘You’re no Mister bloody Australia y’self … so don’t poke mullock at anyone for being a bit skinny.’
an ugly man or (usually) woman (London and UK-wide)
Munt, in Suffolk, means ‘an inferior kind of fire-clay’. Maybe this use links to mount, used in Ireland to refer to a slatternly girl or woman (or a girl who is perceived as such). It is definitely a variant on the word munter, described in one dictionary as an ugly girl who is ‘one step up from a minger’.
See THE MIRROR CRACKED, and also BUTTERS, DUFFY, FUSTY, LAIDLY, MINGING, OBZOCKY, RANK, SKANK