For further confusion it should be noted that a muckle is also a heavy maul for killing cod. The OED illustrates it with a quotation from Kipling’s 1897 novel Captains Courageous: There was no sound except.. the flapping of the cod, and the whack of the muckles as the men stunned them.
There was a 1937 film of the novel with Spencer Tracy and the English child actor Freddy Bartholomew who later, like his contemporary Shirley Temple, had a cocktail named after him. Both are non-alcoholic and the recipes sound disgusting.
It’s difficult to get away from muck: the Online OED has a column down the left-hand side of the page listing all the other words alphabetically within fifty or so of the one you are looking up, a hideously time-wasting arrangement which obliges me to inform my readers that muckibus is a rare Irish word meaning drunkenly sentimental or maudlin and muckerish is US college slang, also rare, meaning unsportsmanlike.
Mucker, on the other hand, has a great number of different meanings. I use it in the British army sense when I end this post with: that’s all for now, me old muckers.
1 comment:
surely twa piggles dinna mek’ a thrup simply means two pigs don't make a third. They could be two males or two females.
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