Talk:mucker

Usage in Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett uses mucker in the first lines of his novel Red Harvest:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in ...

What do you think is the intended meaning? A friend or acquaintance of the narrator? Some tough guy? A worker in a quarry or some civil public works? --Mcovas 11:11, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Etymology

Yiddish/German Macher

Edit; Anyone else think something is missing? I'm from a cockney-jewish background and the yiddish expression was in use by my great grandparents as "my old macher", which with a cockney accent sounds like mucker but means "a doer" or a "boss" so is more akin to guv'nor than the english mucker cited in this article. Basically 'allo boss.