Wazzock

A firmly Yorkshire and Northern English word for an idiot, used the way Yorkshire specialises in, more exasperated fondness than genuine cruelty. Its actual origin is genuinely unresolved. The earliest documented print use is in Mike Harding's 1984 novel When the Martians Land in Huddersfield, though Harding himself later said he'd used the word since childhood and that it was already common slang across Lancashire and Yorkshire well before that. It got a big popularity boost three years earlier still, in 1981, when Yorkshire comedian Tony Capstick used it in his surprise chart hit "Capstick Comes Home." Two real theories exist for where the word itself came from: a Northern contraction of "wiseacre" (an old word for a smug know-it-all), possibly shaped by the unrelated insult "pillock," or a combination of "wazz" (slang for urine) with the diminutive "-ock" ending common across Northern dialect. Harding himself has also jokingly floated a third, entirely unverifiable idea: that it came from the name of the instrument once used to fling a monarch's chamber waste out of a window.