seckle

See also: Seckle

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Jamaican Creole sekkle, from English settle.

Verb

seckle (third-person singular simple present seckles, present participle seckling, simple past and past participle seckled)

1. (intransitive, transitive, African-American Vernacular, MLE, slang) To settle down, relax.
   • 2015 July 1, Manga Saint Hilare (lyrics and music), “Current Mood”‎^[2]:

     I don't know why you even bothered and got my hopes up / Bitch, I should've just seckled and kept my love gun in my holster

   • 2020, Gabriel Krauze, Who They Was, London: 4th Estate, →ISBN, page 177:

     Gotti kisses his teeth and says I only took a little bud. A little bud? Are you mad? I still had half my fucking draw left, don’t try take me for some dickhead and Gotti says seckle yourself and stop shouting man.

Further reading

• “seckle”, “sekkle”, in Urban Dictionary, launched 1999.

Alemannic German

Alternative forms

• secklä, seckla
• seggle, segglä, seggla

Etymology

Originally likely derived from either Sack (“sack, bag”) with the ablauting iterative/inchoative suffix -(e)le (which would, however, yield /æ/ for the first vowel in most modern dialects) or as a back-formation of Seckler, from Middle High German seckelære.

The jounce sense has been explained by comparison to bǖtleⁿ for which a parallel semantic development has been claimed to exist. It is also found in the Deutsches Wörterbuch under sacken.

The run sense, which is the dominant if not the only sense in modern times, has been recorded since at least the beginning of the 20th century. It is included in the 7th volume (1913) of the Schweizerisches Idiotikon with the usage restrictions Knabensprache (“sociolect of young boys”) and Basel-Stadt. Parallelly, it has also found its way into Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli's 1922 slang dictionary Die schweizerische Soldatensprache 1914–1918 (“Swiss army slang 1914-1918”). The vulgar connotation possibly arose from a folk-etymological belief that it derives from Seckel (“scrotum”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈsek͡xlə/

Verb

seckle (third-person singular simple present secklet, past participle gsecklet, auxiliary haa)

1. (intransitive, possibly obsolete) to exercise the trade of bagmaking
2. (intransitive, possibly obsolete) to grasp into a bag
3. (transitive, possibly obsolete) to place into a bag

   Synonym: iischtecke

4. (intransitive, possibly obsolete) to jounce, jolt

   Synonym: rüttle

Verb

seckle (third-person singular simple present secklet, past participle gsecklet, auxiliary sii)

1. (intransitive, slang, sometimes considered vulgar) to run

   Synonyms: (neutral) schpringe, (neutral) renne

Derived terms

• Seckle
• abseckle
• wägseckle
• devoseckle
• furtseckle
• umeseckle
• ufeseckle
• abeseckle

Related terms

• iisacke

Further reading

• Schweizerisches Idiotikon. Wörterbuch der schweizerdeutschen Sprache^[3] (in German), volume 7, 1913, column 674
• “seckle”, in Wörterbuch Berndeutsch-Deutsch (in German), berndeutsch.ch, 1999–2024