Q: After watching the Manhunt TV series about the search for Lincoln’s assassin, I looked for further details online. Some articles used the phrase “truckling arts,” but I wasn’t able to find it in dictionaries. Can you help me understand what those particular “arts” are all about?
A: Someone skilled in the “truckling arts” is a sycophant, like Uriah Heep in the Dickens novel David Copperfield (1850) or Mr. Collins in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813).
The expression comes from the verb “truckle,” meaning to act in a subservient manner. But when the verb first appeared in the early 17th century it had a much different sense. To “truckle” was to sleep in a truckle bed, one rolled or slid under another when not in use.
As Merriam-Webster online explains, “the fact that truckle beds were pushed under larger standard beds had inspired a figurative sense of truckle: ‘to yield to the wishes of another’ or ‘to bend obsequiously.’ ”
The figurative usage is derived from an early 15th-century noun, “truckle,” which meant “a small wheel with a groove in its circumference round which a cord passes,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED’s earliest citation is from a 1417 entry in the accounts of King Henry V of England: “j apparaille ix pullifs vj Trokles” (“I furnished 9 pulleys and 6 truckles”).
The term “truckle bed” appeared in the mid-15th century. The OED defines it as “a low bed running on truckles or castors, usually pushed beneath a high or ‘standing’ bed when not in use; a trundle-bed.”
The dictionary’s first citation, in Latin and Middle English, is from the Statutes of Magdalen College, University of Oxford (1459):
“Sint duo lecti principales, et duo lecti rotales, Trookyll beddys vulgariter nuncupati” (“There shall be two main beds and two wheeled beds, commonly called ‘truckle beds’ ”).
When the verb “truckle” appeared a century and a half later, it meant “to sleep in a truckle-bed,” the OED says, and was construed as being “under (beneath) the person occupying the high bed.”
The first Oxford example is from The Coxcomb, a comedy by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, believed written in the early 1600s: “I’le truckle heere Boy, give me another pillow.”
In the mid-1600s, the dictionary says, the adjective “truckling” appeared and meant “subordinate or inferior” or “meanly submissive, servile.”
The OED’s first citation is from a poem, “The Publique Faith,” in a collection of translations and poetry by the English writer Robert Fletcher:
“The elf dares peep abroad, the pretty foole / Can wag [move around] without a truckling standing-stoole [baby walker]” (from Ex Otio Negotium. Or, Martiall His Epigrams Translated: With Sundry Poems and Fancies, 1656, described by Fletcher as “the scattered Papers of my Youth”).
A decade later, Oxford says, the verb took on the figurative sense of “to take a subordinate or inferior position; to be subservient, to submit, to give precedence.”
The dictionary’s earliest citation is from a Sept. 2, 1667, entry in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: “[Sir Willam Coventry says] he will never, while he lives, truckle under anybody or any faction, but do just as his own reason and judgment directs.”
The OED doesn’t mention the phrase “truckling arts,” but the usage was apparently first recorded in the 19th century. The earliest example we’ve found is from the Secret History of the Court of England (1832), by Lady Anne Hamilton.
In this passage, she criticizes the actions of George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister:
“But, to anyone acquainted with the truckling arts of Mr. Canning, such conduct was no more than might have been expected.”
Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.
