Origin of the phrase “to have no truck with”

etymologyfrenchphrase-originphrases

This phrase "to have no truck with" has bothered me ever since I stumbled upon it, the reason being it makes no logical sense whatsoever even remotely if you go by the lexical meaning of the words in English.

For the benefit of those who aren't aware, this phrase means to have nothing to do with [sthg].

The most popular usage of this phrase is probably in Pablo Neruda's poem Keeping Quiet (read full poem here):

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about;

I want no truck with death.

I had always wondered if it had foreign origins, but I never found any definitive confirmation online. Now that I am learning French, I found a striking resemblance between this phrase and how the French word "truc" is used.

Truc, in French, is a colloquialism meaning "thing" or "stuff", often used to replace something trivial. It surprises me how this word perfectly complements the meaning of the phrase in question.

This word, as with our English phrase, has negative connotations as well. For example, "On raconte des trucs sur lui," which means, they say some nasty stuff about her.

Owing to the lexical similarity of this word with the phrase, as well as the semantic similarity (to a degree), I draw the theory that this is where the phrase originated.

Is it possible for someone to verify the validity of my hypothesis?

Best Answer

Lexico gives two definitions for truck. The first is the wheeled vehicle. The other, which "have no truck with" is listed under is a noun/verb pair that means "barter" (with some other related definitions). Therefore, "have no truck with" can be paraphrased as "have no dealings with". Lexico gives this etymology:

Middle English (as a verb): probably [from] Old French, of unknown origin; compare with medieval Latin trocare.

Cross referencing, I found truken (verb) in the MED (defined as "barter"). Its etymology there is given more solidly as:

OF troquier, trochier & ML trocāre; for forms in -u- cp. AF truck barter.

This connection with trochier is shown in the first example, which is spelled with ch:

Men beoð wode þe trochið [Cleo: trochieð] swa uuele. — Ancrene Wisse, c1230(?a1200)

This means there is indeed a connection with French, but not a connection with truc ("thingamajig"), as Wiktionary gives the etymology for that as:

derived from Vulgar Latin *trūdicō, from trūdō.

(I'm not sure the timeframe for this, unfortunately.)

The noun form of truck appears in Early Modern English, and not just in negative contexts. A search of EEBO, which is Early Modern English (EME), gives some examples:

(There are also a few results for Lexico's first sense of truck — in this case defined as "a wooden disk at the top of a ship's mast or flagstaff" — such as in Six dialogues about sea-services.)

Moving out of EME, there are still more examples to be had:

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