chuck

   In modern times, especially in the USA, this is often a nickname of someone whose real first name is Charles. Occasionally it is heard as a survival of a term of endearment well used since the sixteenth century, a variant of ‘chick’ or ‘chicken’. Shakespeare shows it being used to both men and women in Twelfth Night (3:iv), Love’s Labour’s Lost (5:i), Macbeth (3:ii), Henry the Fifth (3:ii), Antony and Cleopatra (4:iv), and Othello (3:iv). The word occurs alone, or as ‘dearest chuck’, ‘sweet chuck’. ‘Chuck’ was certainly being used in the nineteenth century, as its occurrence in novels like Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë shows. In Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens, a woman addresses a man as ‘chuckey’. ‘Chuckie’ is an endearment in The Sleepers of Erin, by Jonathan Gash, used by a man to his lover. ‘Chuck’ itself is used by an English prostitute to an American soldier in The Magic Army, by Leslie Thomas. Rabbit Redux, by John Updike, has a black American man who consistently calls a white man ‘Chuck’ in what is usually a friendly tone. He also addresses the man’s son as ‘Babychuck’. The man addressed is Harry, but ‘Chuck’ may here be simply a substitute name, the equivalent of Charlie. The reason for the association of ‘Chuck’ with Charles is not known, unless it be a simple alliteration of the opening sound. There is a traditional English playground rhyme, quoted by the Opies in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren: Charlie, Charlie, chuck, chuck, chuck, Went to bed with three young ducks.