There has been some discussion about this word on the "Your dialect words" page, so I thought I would bring it to the front page to give it a bit more publicity.
Mucker is a very common word in Warrington that means "friend" or "mate". It is, I think it's safe to say, exclusively used from men to men. I have never heard a woman referred to as mucker, not have I heard a woman refer to someone else as mucker. Please, correct me if I am wrong.
There were some suggestions that mucker is specific to Warrington, but that does not seem to hold true. A quick Google search shows that it is also used in the South, a fact that is confirmed by my Londoner friend being well aware of it. Interestingly, Wiktionary states that mucker is primarily used in the southern dialects, which is clearly not the case!
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mucker
To my mind, a strong contender for the origin of this dialect word would be the Irish mo chara, which means "my friend". The massive immigration from Ireland to Liverpool over the years would make this a feasible proposition, and presumably it would not take much for such a word to trickle down the Mersey to Warrington and other towns along the shoreline.
Another possibility that makes sense is the task of mucking out animals, where a worker would remove the animal faeces from the stalls in a barn. Anyone who has done this knows that it is a hard, dirty, thankless task.
To muck out is a phrasal verb and is no doubt related to another phrasal verb to muck in, which means to join in the work in order to share the tasks (and presumably get the job finished quicker). A common feature of many languages, especially English, is a phenomenon called conversion. This results in the change in function of a word. For example, the lexical verb to muck, from which the phrasal verbs are derived, changes function and word class to become a noun, mucker, that is, the person who does the mucking.
It is easy to imagine how any fellow worker involved in the mucking would be called a mucker, and subsequently how the use of this word could spread to other people involved in physical work, and eventually become synonymous with a workmate and/or friend.
What do you think? Do you use mucker where you live? Does it mean friend, or something completely different?
Hiya wirelector. I was thinking exactly the same thing when we were dicussing on the word page.It seemed obvious that it would derive from all mates together mucking in to do a job.
ReplyDeleteI have always heard it used to mean a friend man to man and have never heard a woman say it. Of course a lot of Irish men came to work in Warrington especially on the canal. Censuses show a lot of Irish families living in Warrington
around the Cockhedge area. So it could be the Irish word that has possibly changed over years to mucker.
"trickled down the Mersey" thats a smashing figure of speech :-)
Thanks, Gaynor. I was quite pleased with that one :-)
DeleteYou make a good point. Many of the navvies who came to work of the Sankey - St. Helens canal were indeed Irish, and they undoubtedly brought their language and dialects with them. Just how much they influenced the Warrington dialect is a difficult question to answer. But it's fun to speculate.