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Not wuthering or withering

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abstibus | 22:23 Sat 21st Jan 2012 | Phrases & Sayings
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Can anyone come up with a word, possibly dialect or colloquial, that describes a decrepit, mouldering house? It's something like the words above, but not what I want.
It's annoying me - could it be dundering (towers)?
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Delapidated, rickety,ramshackle, tumbledown.
Dundering is just the word. My old da used to say the place was like a dundering inn. Meaning it looked as though it was collapsing around us.
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Dundering Inn it is.
Thanks, Sandy
The phrase, 'dundering inn', appeared on AB elsewhere recently and I pointed out that it was almost certainly just a mishearing of 'dundering-in'. I cannot for the life of me see what it can possibly have to do with inns or taverns any more than any other building!
According to the Oxford English Dictionary - the word-'bible' - to dunder is a variant of an old Scots verb, dunner, meaning to collapse with a reverberating noise. (The link with thunder is pretty clear.) You could, therefore, describe the house you refer to as the victim of a dundering-in. I'd need some persuading that calling it "a dundering inn" is the right phrase!
I should have added above that I like SMP's suggested 'tumbledown', given that it actually contains the idea of collapse within it.
how about

clatch
failzeit
at the owerfain'
ricklie
Tumbledown sounds best to me
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it may not be semantically correct but it does it for me.
I know someone who uses the words ' an oul' quilt' to describe a truly obnoxious person. I know exactly what she means.
Anne, you're obviously perfectly fee to use whatever description you prefer, it's just that the one you've chosen does not appear to make any sense, unless the building concerned actually WAS an inn. I don't see how a tumbledown cottage, church, shop, office-block or whatever can be referred to as an inn, no matter what state it may now be in.
An 'oul quilt', on the other hand, is a perfect metaphor. But what the hey...Good luck to you!
mine

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