When people call my narrow boat a 'barge', I wince. I didn't know any better myself a decade ago. I didn't know what a gongoozler was, nor a quoin, nor a looby. Every profession or calling develops its own terminology, and often it developed to distance the tradesmen from intruding strangers.
Sometimes the specialist waterways words define very precisely, because other words are too general - such as 'narrowboat' instead of 'barge'. Sometimes they are simply synonyms, such as 'strap' for 'mooring rope'. At other times they are unique, such as 'gongoozler', because the phenomenon doesn't exist elsewhere. And then there's the simply misspelling - 'cill' - or mispronunciation - 'ellum' - that's taken hold to describe something not quite singular, but certainly changed to suit the circumstance of the canals.
A waterways glossary would be helpful to describe these terms, but I haven't found the definitive one.
Jim Shead makes a very good effort in his compendious site: www.jim-shead.com. This one's very comprehensive, but hampered by a difficult search; you can either browse by clicking on one of the letter-category buttons and leaf through, or search the entire site from the home page. Doing the search means you get results from the whole site, not just the glossary, which is a slight disappointment.
If Jim could partion off his glossary as a stand-alone subfolder, a page a term, I'd recommend it unhesitatingly to Google Glossary.
John Brinnand's site has a shorter glossary, again unfortunately broken up into sections, but nowhere near as complete.
It wouldn't be hard to create the definitive canals glossary, so that you just Google 'define:gongoozle' to get a result. But I was born a critic, not a creator, so someone else will need to do it.
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