I went to England in my teens and worked as a navvy in the sixties with the Murphy brothers etc, 'The green and the grey and RSK' as the saying went at that time,i done a spell with them all and the saying of the long distance men was always 'pincher kiddies' only very seldom was it laddies.   A pincher was also a temporary frame consisting of two upright planks with two struts between them used to shore up a trench until it was properly timbered. A lot of the old timers back then used to have songs and poems about the Irish naavy life, and 'the crack was good in cricklewood' was one of them, i would say it was out long before Dominic Behan wrote McAlpines fusiliers. we had a lingo of our own looking back, where men were skins, the ganger man had the 'shout',an expression which came from pulling in cable by hand, and we pulled each time the ganger man shouted. Cookin was 'shacklin up'.and going to the pub at night where they spent the sub was doing the 'session' There was 'rakes of beer','deadmen',the 'skipper''gresheens' and 'dampers' tarmackers and narrowbacks. Damping, wetting the bed, was very often blamed on kidneys weakened by sleeping out but the truth was it was more often caused by drinking 20 pints of beer on the way home from work and falling into bed drunk. When the oul landlady discovered the damage in the morning you would be sleeping out under the ditch. There is probably no Dictionary meaning to a lot of the slang used by the navvy's. As for nicknames, Bere V Bear,i worked with rakes of men nicknamed Horse,also the Pony,the Donkey, Racehorse,Elephant, and even the Pig. I remember when we moved to a new town on a job we would be told not to say we were Murphy's men when looking for digs or drinking in a new pub, as a lot of them had a bar on the cable men,especially Murphy's men because of the fighting and drinking. A lot of people resented the Connemara men because they spoke the gaelic but i always got on well with all but a tiny minority of them,and respected them for using the language, and this held true for every county, as they all had their blaggards my own county included. I remember working with three Connies who spoke practically no English, and i did'nt see anyone worried about the fact that all around them were talking in English,though if it had been the other way around a bit of paranoa would doubtless have set in. Ultan Crowleys book gives a good picture of what the times were like then,and while i loved the life back then, and had good friends from every county in Ireland, those times are probably better gone. By the way i still have the foot iron given to me when i was 18 by Mick Gallagher from Mayo, the grey Murphy's gangerman. McAlpines rubber boots worn by the tunnel tigers had the footiron built into it.