I was drawn to the word aw-shucks appearing in the following paragraph of the latest article which I forgot to take note of the source:
“You know, I’m new to this campaign. Honestly, I never thought I would
be standing here. I thought I would be spending this evening with all
my friends in the great state of Indiana,” Indiana Gov. Mike Pence
said in his RNC debut tonight. His aw-shucks approach went over well
with delegates outraged by Ted Cruz’s refusal to endorse GOP nominee
Donald Trump earlier in the night.
I was totally unfamiliar with the word “aw-shucks,” and found out the following definition in the free dictionary:
awshucks adj. seeming to be modest, self-deprecating, or shy:
[C20: from the US interjection aw shucks, an expression of modesty or diffidence]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014
Google Ngram shows that the word emerged in mid 1940, and its usage has been on a rapid increase to 0.00000136% level in 2000.
I’m curious to know the currency level and origin of this word. Does this word often apper in conversation and writings? How did the word that sounds as if like the exclamation, “Oh shock” come into American, informal, and in particular, adjective word?
Best Answer
“Aw shucks, we still don’t know squat!”
When I first read your question, my reaction was that surely this must be explained in every dictionary. But you know what? It isn’t! That must make it confusing to the non-native speaker. The short story is that shucks is a euphemism for shit, making “aw shucks” a watered-down version of “oh shit” that has long ago lost its harsh overtones.
The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, Merriam-Webster, 1991
The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (published by Merriam-Webster, 1991) explains its origin as a euphemism at length on page 249:
Wikipedia
Wikipedia tells the same story under its entry for shit, albeit more briefly:
So it’s a simple story though, really. The word shucks falls into the category of a minced oath, much like gosh, darn, dang, heck, shoot, crud, frick, and so many others. That is, it originated (quoting Wikipedia here) as
English Lexicogenesis, Oxford University Press, 2014
On page 122 of English Lexicogenesis (Oxford University Press, 2014) D. Gary Miller writes, placing its origin at 1843:
Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language, Free Press, 2005
One page 100 of Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language (Free Press, 2005), Ruth Wajnryb writes:
The positive and negative of uses of shucks exactly match those of shit, as Wajnryb rightly points out.
You can see where it comes from when you see it in phrases like the example given by Oxford Dictionaries Online for it:
Or from Collins:
Collins defines this as
By now you have probably correctly surmised that it’s used exactly the same way that shoot often is. In other words, this usage originated as a minced oath for shit, although no one thinks anything profane, taboo, or rude by it any longer. That’s what happens with minced oaths: they lose their rudeness.
Interjection versus Negative Polarity Item
You might feel that the injection Aw shucks! is somehow different from the negative polarity item found in not worth shucks. Although the low-level part-of-speech classification as an interjection differs from the one in which it occurs as a negative polarity item, there’s no reason to think those have separate origins.
Interjection
Negative Polarity Item
By the time you get to the bottom, the taboo origin can appear to be completely lost. But the matter of using shucks as both injection and a linked negative polarity item is the same one of using shit as both those things. As Professor observed:
Pronunciation: Aw shucks ≠ Aw shocks
One last thing: in your question you mentioned “aw shock”. However, shock will never be pronounced the same as shuck. The most common pronunciation of shock in North America is probably /ʃɑk/, although both /ʃɔk/ and /ʃɒk/ also occur frequently enough. That variation is due to various mergers between the vowels in Wells’ canonical lexical sets LOT, CLOTH, and THOUGHT in the many dialects of North American.
Those are the wrong lexical sets for shucks though. The pronunciation of shucks is /ʃʌks/. That means it has the STRUT vowel.
At the risk of being crude, that means that shucks rhymes with fucks, a taboo word. My own conjecture is that shucks as a euphemism for shit owes some of its appeal to the way it takes not only the front-end of shit but also the back-end of fucks, thereby doubling its allusion.