If there was a word that could fully express a sense of regular melancholy at yet another well laid plan turning out poorly, it is my favorite expression of this sort of sighing shrug of the shoulders: shucks! It’s a word that seems well suited to resignation and repeated failure, one that speaks to the lovable loser in all of us.

I often use “shucks” to mean many of these things. It’s a way of expressing a sense of humility in the face of great odds. It is the sort of Charlie Brown inside of me, the guy who’s just living his life despite all the failures and problems that come his way. Shucks then is a word that seems friendly and warm, a relief when I’d want to cry out in frustration.

All that said, while researching this favorite of exclamations, I learned its etymology comes from a portmanteau of two of English’s more ordinary and yet colorful words. It’s a combination of two of this language’s oldest terms, the noun shit and the verb fuck. It turns out then, that my favorite melancholic exclamation originally had both a fecal and a sexual connotation. Shucks!