“Bear Hunt,” c.1640, an oil on canvas painting by Frans Snyders and Peter Paul Rubens. A bear is attacking a man on horseback, who is armed with a sword, while another man rides to his rescue. Dead or injured dogs lie on the ground. In the back, another man is blowing a horn.
26 September 2022
To tucker out is to weary, to grow tired, become exhausted. It’s an Americanism that dates to early nineteenth-century New England. A related Americanism, recorded a bit later is to take the tuck out of, meaning to sap one’s strength or courage. But why tuck?
The verb to tuck traces back to the Old English tucian, meaning to treat poorly, to afflict. But this sense faded away during the early Middle English period, and its extended sense of to rebuke faded by the end of the seventeenth century. But in Middle English tuck had acquired the sense of to fold up, to tie up, a sense we’re familiar with today. One tucks in one’s shirt or tucks a child into bed, for example. Here’s the word from Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century Summoner’s Tale, describing the title character:
Whan folk in chirche had yeve him what hem leste,
He wente his wey; no lenger wolde he reste.
With scrippe and tipped staf, ytukked hye,
In every hous he gan to poure and prye,
And beggeth mele and chese, or elles corn.(When folk in church had given him what they wished,
He went on his way; no longer would he stay.
With satchel and tipped staff, robe tucked high,
In every house he began to peer and pry,
And beg meal and cheese, or else grain.)
By around 1600, tuck was also being used as the name for a type of fishing net, one in which the netting was folded to create a bunt or pocket into which the fish were gathered. From Richard Carew’s 1602 Survey of Cornwall:
The Sayne is a net, of about fortie fathome in length, with which they encompasse a part of the Sea, and drawe the same on land by two ropes, fastned at his ends, together with such fish, as lighteth within his precinct.
The Tucke carrieth a like fashion, saue that it is narrower meashed, and (therefore scarce lawfull) with a long bunt in the midst.
And this fishing use engendered a sense of tuck meaning a stomach, or by extension, an appetite. Hence, we get to tuck in, meaning to eat. William Holloway’s 1838 General Dictionary of Provincialisms records this sense from the south of England:
TUCK, s. [Tuck, Germ. Cloth, woollen-cloth.] A cloth worn by children to keep their clothes clean; a pinafore. Hants.
Stomach; appetite; as, “He has a pretty good Tuck of his own,” means that a man is a great eater. Hants. Sussex.
To TUCK-IN, v.a. [A Tuck, according to Fenning, is a kind of net with a narrow mesh, and a large bunt in the middle, and may be used ironically for stomach.]
To eat voraciously. Sussex. Hants.
And from this we also get the Australian and New Zealand term tucker, meaning food.
If to tuck in is to take in nourishment, then to tucker out is to deplete one’s energy or courage. We see this form appear in New England in the 1830s. The following passage is from an article about a shark hunt, which is eerily reminiscent of the movie Jaws, that appeared in the January 1836 issue of The Knickerbocker:
“Wearies!” echoed the excited harpooner; “why, the critter’d tow us clear round the world ag’in wind and tide, ten knot an hour. There’s no sich thing as tuckering out your raal white shark: he’s all bone and sinners. As to his wearing ship, he’ll show no sich navigation, I guess, till he gets into blue water, and this tack’ll be bolt downward, like a loose anchor.”
On 25 March 1836, the following appeared in Bangor, Maine’s Daily Commercial Advertiser:
The travelling between this and Belfast[, Maine] is bad enough in all conscience—even the “old Eddington mare,” which some folks insist is the best horse in the whole Penobsoct [sic] region, would get “tuckered out” in half the distance.
And this passage is from a story that appears in print in Newburyport, Massachusetts’s Essex North Register of 29 April 1836. The story was reprinted in many newspapers over the next few years. The voice is that of one described as a “yankee backwoodsman”:
“I thank you a thousand times,” said the stranger, “I reckoned to have got to the tavern by sundown, but I hav’nt [sic], and as I’m prodigiously tuckered out, I’ll stay, and thank ye into the bargain,” following the clergyman into the house.
The related phrase to take the tuck out of dates in print to a few decades later, although it was undoubtedly circulating orally prior to that. From Day Kellogg Lee’s 1852 book Summerfield; or Life on a Farm, in a chapter about a bear hunt:
Terror was up in a moment, and leaped from heart to heart. Away bounded Fabens, and closely on his heels bounded the grim and open-mouthed bear. Over a rock he leaped, round a tree he ran, and the bear bounded after. Then came dogs and men, and were repulsed with shrieks and ejaculations. Then they renewed the attack; and, as old Spanker caught her by the leg, and she turned upon the dog in fury, Colwell put a ball through her head, and the fearful chase was over.
“A narrow squeak fo [sic] you, Fabens,” said Wilson; “a very narrow squeak.”
“Too narrow, I declare,” said Uncle Walter. “I cannot stand that, I must set down. I thought Matthew was a gonner, and the fright takes the tuck out o’ my old knees.”
I don’t know about you, but tracing all the detours and permutations of this entry took the tuck out of me.
Sources:
“The Advertiser.” Daily Commercial Advertiser (Bangor, Maine), 25 March 1836, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“The Book Agent.” Essex North Register (Newburyport, Massachusetts), 29 April 1836, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Carew, Richard. The Survey of Cornwall. London: S. Stafford for John Jaggard, 1602, 30r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“A Chapter on Sharking.” The Knickerbocker, January 1836, 21. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Summoner’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1735–39. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. tuck, n.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. tucker out, v., tuckered out, adj.
Holloway, William. A General Dictionary of Provincialisms. Lewes: Baxter and Son, 1838, 178. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Lee, Day Kellogg. Summerfield; or Life on a Farm. Auburn, New York: Derby and Miller, 1852, 22–23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. tuken, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tucker, v.1., tucker, n.1., tuck, v.1.
Image credit: Frans Snyders and Peter Paul Rubens, c.1640, North Carolina Museum of Art. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.