Ever notice how words that rhyme with “truck” can get a fella in a lot of trouble?
And no, I’m not talking about the obvious “F-bomb” that’s been the downfall of potty mouths like Lenny Bruce and Tiger Woods. I dealt yesterday, for example, with “schmuck” as a potential land mine, but “puck,” “truck” and “suck” all fall into roughly the same category.
And no, I’m not talking about the obvious “F-bomb” that’s been the downfall of potty mouths like Lenny Bruce and Tiger Woods. I dealt yesterday, for example, with “schmuck” as a potential land mine, but “puck,” “truck” and “suck” all fall into roughly the same category.
Run through the list alphabetically (avoiding the temptation to play “The Name Game” as you do so, please *) and a plethora of ploblems plesent themselves:
Amuck (amok), bullock, buttock, Buck, chuck, cluck, duck, epoch, eunuch, haddock, hillock, huck, lame-duck, luck, muck, mukluk, pluck, puck, roebuck, ruck, truck, tuck, schmuck, shuck, snuck, stomach, struck, stuck, suck, upchuck, woodchuck … even “Norfolk,” when articulated as a proper Southern gentleman would do.
Now, we can cast away some of these words just because they sound ugly (as any ending in “uck” are wont to do), such as amok, haddock, mukluk, pluck and stuck.
Several can evoke anatomical contexts where the writer is just bound to come up with an image that’ll cross the line at some point: Buck, bullock, buttock, eunuch, hillock and suck.
But accuse someone of being “puckish,” and you’re like as not to have a fight on your hands, fact aside that the depiction is wholly innocuous. Similarly, I once casually greeted an acquaintance with “What’s up, Chuck?” only to realize that “upchuck” is the smelly yellow-brown stuff that stains the carpet when your kid’s gotten a bad Tootsie Roll.
In the Flower Power vernacular of the 1960s, a long-haired, hippie-type freak might well have nodded casually to an officer of the law who colloquially advised him to keep on truckin’ – or decided, truculently, that he just couldn’t truck with Mister Piggy’s advice and started a riot.
The 1969 classic movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” opened with a long-haired hippie-type political statement: “There is no gravity … the Earth sucks.” A dozen years later, “One Golden Pond” popularized the phrase “suck face,” which seemed to hint at something more anatomically disturbing. Today, any 3-year-old might (innocently or not) acknowledge that “naptime sucks” without fear of parental retribution. Yet the word doesn’t pass muster with Google if placed in the header of an AdWords text box.
Not sure whether I can truck with that contradiction.
A politician bristles at being termed a lame duck, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well …
Never, EVER, intimate that a woman “clucks like a hen,” no matter how accurate the characterization.
Truth is, word usage is as much a challenge of perception as one of precision. It’s difficult to contend that you meant no offense when sloppy word choice testifies to the contrary.
* The Songfacts website notes that “The Name Game is a song written by Soul singer Shirley Ellis and her manager, Lincoln Chase (in 1964). In it Shirley proves that she can rhyme any name using just a few simple rules ("Shirley - Shirley, Shirley bo Birley Bonana fanna fo Firley Fee fy mo Mirley, Shirley!"). Shirley used to amaze audiences by taking name game requests. Shirley usually had the good sense to ignore requests for "Chuck" …. This song was also known as the "Banana Song," (and) was based on a children's game she used to play.
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