The Wanderer; A Thesaurus

[TANGODANCER]

Finally managed to track down a couple of terms of endearment my Irish father regularly used on me:

Omadaun and Spalpeen both apparently mean "Stupid, foolish boy"

[Little Green Man]

A quick trawl of the web suggests that 'by the crin' is still used in Wigan today. Like 'crikey' or 'by jove', I'd have thought it was a corruption of a mildly blasphemous oath, ie 'by The Christ'. You could imagine that 'by the blithering crin' is an earthier (yet self-censored) version of 'by the crin'.

If you recall, Terry in The Likely Lads used to say 'by the cringe'. I suspect that has the same origins.

[Athers]

Old man is from Leigh and has been known to say both 'by the crin' and 'clempt'.

Think Leigh and Wigan, which do differ, seem to be the last bastions of this sort of stuff!?

[Bruce Rioja]

LGM - Yeah, Grandad was a man that I never once heard swear and the phrase was pretty much his WTF?

Athers - I was thinking earlier that I should really ask you and Matt about this as he was a Wiganese collier but spent the most of his working life at Bickershaw.