Pylimitics

“I think,” said Corney, “we’d better get him up to bed at once?” “Do what yow like,” replied aunt Ann. “It makes no odds to me: I’ll ha’ nothing to do with him! — I’ll have no truck with a tocksicated man.”

If you “have no truck with” someone (or something), that means you want nothing to do with them or it. This is pretty clear in the citation from the 1850 novel The Steward by Henry Cockton.

The phrase “have no truck” is still in use; you’ll most often find it in written depictions of casual speech, particularly when the speakers are from rural parts of the US. 

But the phrase itself is pretty old, and comes from medieval England. “Truck” in this context has nothing to do with vehicles; it’s from the Old French word “troquer,” meaning “trading.” The word is also used in the phrase “truck garden,” which is a garden used to grow produce that’s traded. If you go even further back, this sense of “truck” comes from Latin, where it meant a small wheel made of wood — so there’s a bit of a connection with vehicles if you go that far back.

The link between wooden wheels and trading comes from the basic problem medieval traders faced: if you were going to trade with someone you had to bring the goods you were trading with you. So a wagon or cart of some sort was pretty much required, at least in Europe (the Incas, who lived in the Andes, didn’t use wheeled carts because the trails were too steep). If you were going to have wheels in those days, they were going to be wooden; stone wasn’t very practical, and if you could afford wheels made of metal (and pay some expert craftsman with the skill to make them) then you certainly weren’t concerned with selling a wagonload of potatoes. 

In any case, “truck” came to mean the act of trading, no matter what goods were involved. By the 1600s usage of the word had expanded to include any sort of communication, as well as having a business relationship with someone. That’s where the “have no truck” expression originated; it basically meant you didn’t want to engage in any deals with a person, and for that matter you’d really prefer not to even talk to them. 

By the way, “tocksicated,” at least in 1850, was slang for somebody who had had a bit too much to drink. There are any number of Aunt Anns who’ll have no truck with people like that, and those guys shouldn’t be driving their trucks until they sober up. They might have had too much to drink in a bar or pub where they were playing trucks — a game similar to pool or billiards. 

If you wanted a turn at trucks, but somebody else was ahead of you in line, you might off to truck a beer for their place in the queue. Up until the early 1800s, “truck” was a synonym for trade or swap, as used in Wooden World Dissected in 1707: “Let him truck jackets with any of his barge-men.” 

The way we use “truck” today is pretty recent; it only began to be used to refer to a cart or vehicle around the late 1700s, like this: “A baker’s boy was wheeling his truck of bread along the road” (1815). But by the early 20th century the motor vehicle had started to take over lots of things, including the word truck. So nowadays you can drive a truck, so you’re a trucker, engaged in trucking. Maybe you’re carrying a load of trucks for skateboards? In any case, keep on trucking!