muck and its many variations

muck, but not the Everglades kind

MUCK



After the Valujet crashed into the Everglades, a side bit of information was the quality of muck. Charts were used on the news to explain its depth and composition. Ecologists spoke of its duration. Television journalists probed into it and picked it up for all the world to see. Muck is a wonderful word: It has phonetic resonance, a scientifically sound standard meaning, and a genealogy with ancestors and offspring that are fascinating. Lets examine muck and its many qualities.


One day I was walking in a muddy field. Suddenly my boot sank deep into the mud up to my calf. I pulled, but the boot wouldn't come loose. I pulled harder and my boot dragged out a tangle of mud, rotting grass and leaves and with a sucking, slithering sound. Now my other boot was sinking. I had bogged down in a quagmire of muck. What an onomatopoeic word is muck! It rhymes with suck and stuck, two sensations that one gets as muck is encountered. It is consonant with mud and mule, and a person may need the latter to get out of the former. Other words which conjure up muck are soggy, slush, slimy, gooey, gunk, sludge, mire and that good ol' primordial ooze! It's just the kind of stuff one might use to make a tar baby except that tar baby wouldn't stay together very long--too slippery to last. [Yet, as we learn more about Valujet's transgressions, it may be where it ought to be - stuck in the muck.]


Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1991) gives a lengthy scientific meaning of muck: "a dark, usually black earth that is capable of absorbing much water, that is usually moist or wet so as to have a consistency like that of moist or wet loam or humus, that is marked by the presence of organic usually plant matter in an advanced state of decomposition and in a proportion of usually less than 50 percent, that is rich in nitrogen and relatively low in mineral content and that is very fertile." Hmm, sounds like the Everglades, doesn't it? Lo and behold, Webster's usage example comes from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas: "floundering through the wet black muck." Note, however, that usually is used four times to modify the descriptive phrasing in the definition, so we have another concept about muck: that it is variable in its qualities; there is a great range of muck -- from an almost mudlike goo to a humid compost heap, from black to slate to burnt umber to deep rust. We must be flexible in our approach to muck.


Muck has been around a long time and is a cousin to the word mucus; both can be traced back ultimately to the Sanskrit word muñcati whose basic meaning is "slippery." From thence, our word went through Greek (myxa [nasal mucus]) and Latin (mucere [moldy, musty]) to the Old Norse (myki [dung]) and a branch of that (mjukr [gentle]) which is interesting, but takes only an imaginative leap to understand its soft and warm connection. Old English adopted myki as moc, Middle English transformed the sound and spelling to muk, and it plopped into modern English as muck—the most common definition is, after all, "soft, moist, farmyard manure" (Webster’s Dictionary).


From its fertile, if base, beginnings, muck spread and from it sprouted other interesting words. It was first recorded in the 1400s as a noun with the elemental meaning; from muck later developed the word meaning "one who cleans up muck": mucker. Mucker later came to mean anyone who does the dirty work, the hard, difficult tasks. A good example of this usage is the description of the 1997 Florida Panthers as "muckers and grinders"(Miami Herald).


In the 1500s, muck began to be used as a verb meaning to clean up its noun father. (In 1661, muck's cousin mucus first entered the language during that period of Latination known as the Reformation. Is it a coincidence that was a time of plagues and the Great Fire of London? Incidentally, one small dialect in Britain continues to use a word muckender -- a name for a handkerchief.) The verb was expanded by making compounds, or phrasal verbs, such as muck up (1896) which means "to make a mess of, bungle, botch," like characters in an Agatha Christie mystery; and muck about, which means "to engage in aimless activity, to spend time idly, putter," like characters in a Hemingway novel.


In 1902, an adjective form mucky appeared; it means, of course, "filthy or dirty or repulsive or foul"; however, it also can mean "muggy" like the humid hurricane season air in South Florida.


One of my favorite new words is muckworm, or "miser"; it probably comes from an obsolete usage of muck to mean "money." Muckworm has a sublime connotation of someone scratching and scraping to hoard his filthy lucre.


Finally and most famously is the magnificent word muckraker [1910] to identify those who "search for and expose political or commercial corruption." Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt usually gets credit for coining this muckrake verb usage around 1906. Today, these people are euphemistically called "investigative reporters," but that term hardly has the oomph of muckraker, which fits the perpetrator so well. Muckraker is one of those English words that is especially hard to translate because it so succinctly sums up the doer; in Spanish, it is revelador de escándalos públicos, and in French, déterreur de scandales. The translations seem like someone mucking about compared to the direct muckraker. [Valujet, beware muckrakers; I'm positive that they're digging away.]


Before I end this saga, I must note that the word high muckamuck has no kinship with muck but is derived from a native American Chinook word muk, which as a noun means "food" and as a verb means "to eat"; a high muckamuck is a V.I.P. or influential person— literally the giver of plenty of food to eat, or liberally, the party thrower, the host. Well, Valujet mucked up trying to save money. Perhaps since it wasn't such a good host, the company should be renamed MuckwormJet.

1997

END

This essay was first written before I became Internet proficient.  My print references are lost to time, so I apologize for not listing them.  I no longer have the 1991 dictionary or the 1997 Miami Herald.  I was not able to interest any editor in my essay about muck, which did not really surprise me.  Below are books related to this blog.