Almost skin pike, in a manner of speaking (8)
I believe the answer is:
parlance
'a manner of speaking' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'almost skin pike in' is the wordplay.
'almost' means to remove the last letter (most of the word but not all of it).
'skin' becomes 'pare' ('pare' can be a synonym of 'skin').
'pike in' becomes 'lance' (I can't explain this - if you can you should believe this answer much more).
'pare' with its final letter removed is 'par'.
'par'+'lance'='PARLANCE'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for parlance that I've seen before include "Earn clap for vocabulary of particular subject" , "Way of speaking" , "Way of using words" , "Idiom" , "Manner of speaking peculiar to a specific group" .)