Word of the day: truckle

The word of the day is truckle (the verb, this time):  

1. to submit or yield obsequiously or tamely (usually followed by to )

"give up or submit tamely," 1612, "sleep in a truckle bed" (see truckle (n.)). Meaning "give precedence, assume a submissive position" (1656, implied in truckling) is perhaps in allusion to that type of bed being used by servants and inferiors, or from it simply occupying the lower position. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/truckle)

"In the end neither Deloy nor Córdova nor Aguilar nor Palafox could entice Mendoza to break with the local movement he had soldiered for so long.  If he would not truckle to Magaña, by now one of the clan, much less would he front for Peláez, a perfect outlander."

 - John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Word of the day: truckle

The word of the day is truckle:

Anglo-Norman trocle, trokle, < Latin trochlea = Greek τροχιλία, τροχιλέα, etc., sheaf of a pulley

 A low bed running on truckles or castors, usually pushed beneath a high or ‘standing’ bed when not in use; a trundle-bed. (OED)


"The difference is in emphasis, but these are often sleight-of-hand gestures, magician's tricks, making us think that things are substantially different when really they are almost the same.  Here is Banville on the shifting self: 'Is the oldster in his dotage the same that he was when he was an infant swaddled in his truckle bed?'  Here is Black: 'Isn't it strange to think... that people who are old now were young once, like us?  I meet an old woman in the street and tell myself that seventy years ago she was a baby in her mother's arms.  How can they be the same person, her as she is now and the baby as it was then?'"

 - Joanna Kavenna, "Pseudonymously Yours: The strange case of Benjamin Black", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker