To be tuckered out, or tired, is thought to derive from the image of a starved quadruped that’s so skinny and worn out that it has a “tucked” appearance just behind the ribs. It may have been influenced by an older verb tuck, meaning “to chastise.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Tuckered Out”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Mary. I’m calling you from Veldia, Nebraska.
Welcome to the show.
What can we do for you?
I help out with the Chinese students at my university, and one of them asked a question about the slang tuckered out, and for the life of me, I couldn’t think of an answer to give them, and I felt so bad. I thought maybe that tuckered out was like a bastardization of tired out, but that seemed a little bit off to me.
So what can you do for me?
Yeah, and this is a term that has sort of an obscure history. A lot of people have associated it with the notion of the term tucked, which can refer to an animal like a dog or a horse that is extremely malnourished and therefore slow in general. And they get this sort of look around their ribs where it looks as if the skin is sort of tucked there because they’re just so very thin. You know, their body kind of narrows at that point. And so I know a lot of people have associated it, yeah, with that tucked look in animals.
Yeah, I never would have thought of that.
Yeah, it’s actually mildly horrifying.
Yes, indeed. And you’ll often find in the historical record that tucker alone just exists as a verb without the out. So you can tucker someone or something or something can be tuckered without out in there at all, going back to the early-ish to mid-1800s. And then there’s an older, much, much older verb, now I’d say obsolete or at least archaic in English, the verb tuck alone, T-U-C-K, often meant to criticize or condemn or even beat someone, to punish, to chastise. And in the way that I could see someone kind of adopting that body protection stance that very much looks like your limbs are tucked in. My personal opinion is that there is some interplay between the verb tucker and the verb, the now archaic verb tuck, that kind of leads us to the modern understanding of being tuckered out.
Well, English has a really violent history.
Oh, yeah. Welcome to humanity.
It does, and particularly in relation to how we have treated animals over the centuries. There’s a whole talk I can give about that. Because the story I was reading with them that had that slang term in it was not horrifying at all. And so now I’m not really sure how to bring that up with them, but I’ll figure it out.
Well, we can give you a little linguistics lesson that you can take to them. You can talk to them about the concept of amelioration. And so language often goes through this process of words that are really negative or really severe becoming a little more positive or a little more neutral, at least. And that’s where we find them in the modern language.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say you shouldn’t use the term at all.
No.
I mean, it’s been ameliorated.
Yeah, it’s been ameliorated. And its history and its etymology don’t have to overwhelm our modern understanding of the word. So, Mary, thank you for calling us about this. And let us know if you encounter anything else in your classroom.
Thanks very much.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Well, maybe you’ve been talking with people who speak English as a second language, or maybe you speak English as a second or third or fourth language yourself, and some word has caught your ear and you’re wondering about it. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.
