cark /kark/. verb or noun. To vex, burden or harass…or to suffer from such. Also: a trouble, a burden, a weight. From Latin carcare (to load a wagon), from Latin carrus (wagon). Less commonly, to die, originally an Australian colloquialism, possibly derived from the caw of the carrion crow.
I want to begin
with a new song
on a love that’s my cark and desire,
but is so far I cannot hit her mark
or my words fire her.
(Guillem IX, Duke of Aquitaine)
“What fondness is it to cark and care so much, at that instant and passage from all exemption of pain and care? As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so shall our death the end of all things. Therefore is it as great folly to weep we shall not live a hundred years hence as to wail we lived not a hundred years ago.” (Michel de Montaigne, translated by John Florio)
“…when I had fewer years than thou, my father said, ‘There are many carks in life which a little truth could end.’” (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
“The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams.” (Charles Dickens)
The poet, Owen Hanrahan, under a bush of may
Calls down a curse on his own head because it withers grey;
Then on the speckled eagle cock of Ballygawley Hill,
Because it is the oldest thing that knows of cark and ill…
(W.B. Yeats)
“I asks when we’re allowed out for exercise an’ air. ‘We ain’t let out,’ says he, ‘till the ship sails or unless we cark it. Now, the money.’ Wish I could say I stood my ground, but Arie Grote ain’t no liar. He weren’t jokin’ ‘bout carkin’ it, neither: eight o’ them ‘stout an’ willing lads’ left horizontally, two crammed into one coffin.” (David Mitchell)