Light a shuck means “to skedaddle” or “leave quickly,” and is often found in cowboy literature. It’s a reference to moving quickly while using a burning corn shuck to light one’s way, and may also be influenced by the swiftness fire burns dry corn leaves. The colloquial expression come to fetch fire refers to someone who drops by a neighbor’s house just briefly, as if to pick up something to light one’s own stove. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Light a Shuck”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Tom from Janesville, Wisconsin.
I’ve read a lot of Western novels in the last year by Compton and John Stone and like that.
And they have a term that they use in there that I had never heard before.
And the term is lightest shuck.
And it is used in the sense of, you know, let’s get out of here.
Hey, Red, you just killed the sheriff. Better light a shuck.
And I have no idea what lighting a shuck has to do with getting out of dodge.
Huh.
So getting out of dodge, skedaddle, you light a shuck.
Right.
That’s S-H-U-C-K, like a corn shuck?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Exactly like a corn shuck, as a matter of fact.
Oh, here we go.
Yeah, Tom, you have to think back to time before electricity being widespread or think back to time before flashlights.
If you needed to leave someplace quickly, like a cabin or something out on the range, and go out in the dark, then you had to take your own light with you.
And a quick way to do that would be to grab a corn shuck and stick it in the fire and use that for a light.
And another expression like that, I don’t know if you’ve run into it, is light a rag.
It’s the same idea.
Interesting.
It is in a lot of dictionaries of cowboy language.
A Dictionary of the American West by Winford Blevins has it.
And so it’s possible these writers of these modern or even the older dictionary stories have those same dictionaries.
They’re plucking cowboy language from them.
If you’re going very far, you must have had to have a big sack of corn shucks because they can’t burn very long.
Well, that’s one of the things that the dictionaries say that part of the idea is that they do burn so fast.
A dry corn husk is, it doesn’t last very long.
You can twist them and you can actually rub them in the dirt to make them last a little bit longer.
Another dictionary suggests an even broader idea, the speed at which fire travels through a whole field of dry corn stalks, not just a single shuck held in the hand.
Mm. And this reminds me, there’s another expression, come to fetch fire, which means if you go someplace to fetch fire, if you go to the neighbors to fetch fire, it’s another way of saying the person didn’t stay very long.
Oh, you just came to fetch fire.
So you just pop over, you fetch a little fire, light your shuck, and go on home.
I see. Interesting. So you wouldn’t stay as long as if you came to borrow a cup of sugar.
Pretty much, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, a lot of times when I’ve seen Lydash Shuck in early newspapers in Backwoods, Virginia, places like that, Lydash Shuck is used more as an order than we’re going to Lydash Shuck.
It’s like to tell somebody to get out of here.
Beat it.
Yeah, beat it.
Yeah, I think Zora Neale Hurston used it that way.
I see.
Well, that explains the use in these Western novels that I’ve been reading.
There’s one more way the Cowboys used to say to leave, and that’s one of my favorites.
It says, get out of here and don’t stop for no kissing.
Well, that’s interesting.
Lighting a shuck eventually morphed into kissing.
That’s very interesting.
Call us again sometime, Tom.
Thank you.
Thanks for calling.
I’ll do that.
Thank you very much.
