One I'd not heard of, despite my nautical background:
Weird Words: Tagarene
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You're unlikely to know this word - variously spelled - unless you
come from north-east England, especially the Newcastle area. But it
does occasionally pop up in prose that gains a wider audience:
"Now help me tidy up, this place looks like a bloody
tagarene shop." Another one of her expressions. I had no
idea what a "tagarene shop" was, although it clearly
described the disorder and chaos that always threatened
to overwhelm the house if we didn't clear up after my
mischievous younger brother.
[Broken Music: A Memoir, by Sting, 2003. This
appearance isn't so surprising, since Sting was born in a
suburb of Newcastle named Wallsend (called that because
it's at one end of Hadrian's Wall).]
A tagarene shop was a kind of junk shop, sometime specialising in
old clothes but often carrying a much wider range of miscellaneous
oddments, particularly marine scrap. The tagarene man who ran it
did much of his trade with ships:
A "tagareen man" has a floating shop which he rows
about the tiers of ships, announcing his presence by a
bell. His dealings are carried on by barter or cash, as
may be convenient; and old rope, scrap-iron, or other
similar unconsidered trifles, are exchanged for the
crockery or hardware with which the boat is stocked.
[Northumberland Words, by R O Heslop, 1894.]
Such collections of bric-a-brac, oddments and general detritus were
likely to have made a tagarene shop an excessively untidy place and
it's easy to see how the phrase came to refer to a muddle.
Nobody knows its origin. The Oxford English Dictionary tentatively
suggests it's based on "tag". Local people remember "tagger" in the
sense of marine scrap, though the evidence doesn't show whether
it's the origin of "tagarene" or a shortening of it. One suggestion
is that it's Arab in origin. Some Moors in north Africa have that
name; it's been proposed that it was adopted by them after they had
been expelled from Spain in medieval times. (A link to "Tangerine",
a person from Tangiers, which gave its name to the orange exported
from that city, is improbable.) It's unlikely to be true, but the
suggestion isn't as daft as it sounds, because the Newcastle area
has long had an Arab community.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/pogw.htm