Here’s a word of common parlance with an interesting etymology. We think of shuffling cards or perhaps walking slowly along, dragging our feet. Both meanings exist alongside each other and pose no problems for native speakers of English. My gut instinct told me that the sliding motion of cards when shuffling them (unlike cutting a deck of cards) gives us a hint of the origin.
The Online Etymology Dictionary provides both the “Middle English shovelen “to move with dragging feet,” and well as a possible “Low German schuffeln ‘to walk clumsily, deal dishonestly.’ ” That latter meaning gives us a possible link to the noun “shuffle,” which can be a trick or deceit.
At last, I know what was on the minds of the geniuses at Warner Brothers who created my favorite deep-fried Southern trickster and foil for Bugs Bunny, Colonel Shuffle. He’s a thin-skinned Southern aristocrat in a few cartoons, including the memorable “Mississippi Hare,” with Bugs getting the best of Shuffle at every turn, leading to one of the finest lines in cartoon history when Shuffle is shoved over the side of a riverboat, “Why did you dunk my poor old hide in Ol’ Man River?” Shuffle appeared elsewhere, usually as the butt of jokes rather than playing them, try as he might.
Shuffle is descended from not only Mark Twain’s King and Duke but a long series of picaresque characters that came before the Civil War. When Shuffle declares that he is “the rip-roarin’-est, gold-diggin’-est, sharp-shootin’-est, poker-playin’-est riverboat gambler on the Mississippi!,” he uses boasts we associate with Davy Crockett, Sut Lovingood, Simon Suggs, and other real and fictional “ring-tailed roarers” of Southern-frontier history and tall tales. All of them were expert at playing tricks and pulling cons on gullible strangers.
Good thing they never shuffled their cards around Bugs Bunny, Doc.
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Image: Col. Shuffle’s card-game shuffle–5 aces!