Muckle on to Something

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Bill Focher calling from Surrey, New Hampshire.

Hey, Bill, what can we do for you?

I was curious about a phrase that my father used while I was growing up, and I thought for a long time it was something that was kind of, you know, one of those family heirlooms that you guys talk about.

But I’ve started since I’ve been sort of cued into it, noticing that a few other people around who have no connection to my family also use it.

He used to tell me when I needed to get a hold of something, you know, hold on really hard to something like pulling a rope really tight.

He’d tell me to muckle onto it.

It was usually kind of a little bit jocular, like, you know, don’t be a wimp, muckle right onto it.

So I was curious about it.

I’ve looked up the word muckle.

The only other time I’ve heard anybody else use the word muckle was a Scottish guy who came over and was visiting my farm once.

And he was looking at one of my dogs and called it a fine muckle beast, meaning that it was really big.

Haven’t heard anyone very often use the phrase muckle onto something.

Yeah, the Scots English is a good start, but I’m not sure it’s a connection.

Muckle, M-U-C-K-L-E, has a long history in Scots English and in the northern dialects of British English to mean much or great or to be used as an intensifying or emphatic adverb.

But it’s kind of a stretch to see how it could become the meaning that you’re using, meaning to really apply force or to put your back into it or use everything you’ve got.

That’s kind of what you’re talking about, right?

Yeah. Although one of the people that used it recently was a friend of mine who was talking about during the isolation of the pandemic, when she runs into somebody she knows, she really wants to muckle onto them.

Yeah.

You know, so grab on and not let go kind of thing.

I think we may be talking about different muckles.

We might be talking about three different muckles.

There’s the Scots muckle, which is basically a dialect version of the word much.

And then there’s the military muckle, which as far back as 1900 has been a joking pronunciation of the word muscle.

And you can find uses of it mostly in a military context related to the U.S. Military Academy and West Point.

And it’s sometimes shortened as muck, talking again and again about using your force or mucking something, meaning putting your all into it or mucking through or muckling through, meaning just to barrel on through or just something is really hard, but you’re going to muckle on through to persevere, basically.

And again so that’s more than 100 years of history but also it pops up interesting enough in a thesis written in the 1930s about baseball language.

There’s a there was a trend apparently in the 1930s to kind of in baseball to jokingly modify words and say them in a funny way and muckle was used to refer to muscle, you know, like muscle a ball or muscle the bat or but instead of saying muscle, you’d muckle it.

But then the third muckle, and I think this is the one that your friend was talking about, muckling onto someone, I find it is in a hundred-year-old collection called Dialect Notes, and there’s an entry in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

And it has something to do with to fret or to bother, and another definition is to putter, as in to work casually.

And it’s reported from around Nantucket and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

And I think my guess is it might have something to do with an altered meaning to refer to the way that some people kind of hang about and bother folks, always finding a reason to putter around in your orbit, always kind of a satellite moon circling your planet, so to speak.

But that’s just the guess.

Well, that same dictionary entry includes the definition to seize firmly or grasp.

And interestingly enough, they’re all from New England, Vermont.

Yeah, they are all from New England.

Yeah, but I feel like if I were writing that dictionary entry, I would not have put them under the same definition.

I don’t feel like those citations are related.

I feel like I would have separated them out etymologically.

Yeah, it definitely feels different to me.

I think my friend who was feeling lonely was talking about muckling onto a person the way I would have muckled onto that rope to tie the canoe on the top of the car.

You know, just really grab onto it tight and not let go and not let it slip.

So I think probably that military sense of muckle is more likely what I was encountering.

And that makes sense, too, because my father was a Navy man.

The other family that uses it has a naval history.

And my friend with the pandemic blues, also her father was in the Army.

Well, anyway, there we go.

I think there’s a military connection.

It is possible that the Glomontu and the Put Your Back Into It senses are related.

Certainly, we know that we’ve got a hundred-year history in the military of muckle, and it’s probably not related to the Scots-English one.

All right. Thanks.

Thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Bill.

All right.

Take care.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

I know we’ve got a lot of listeners around the country who’ve served in the military.

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