Bang for the Buck

Introduction to buck expressions

0:00From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and today we delve into three expressions related to our recent episode, A Quick Buck. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. I'm great. Yes. Today we look into a few phrases, one of which is bang for the buck, which has come to mean a good value. Look, Mike, I'm sorry. I have to interrupt because

0:36I feel like I need to take this opportunity to offer listeners a peek behind the Lexicon Valley production curtain, that threadbare, soiled curtain partitioning the audience from the inner sanctum. I'm picturing the curtain between first class and economy on an airplane, but go ahead. All right. In our last meeting, you told me, this is not our recording, but in our last... Off-microphone meeting. Yeah. In our last off-mic meeting, you told me that we would be discussing not only bang for

1:11your buck, but also buckaroo. And I immediately said, eh, too easy. Yeah, you did. I remember. And then I proceeded to tell you what I supposed was the obvious origins of those terms, only I guess I was just slightly off the mark. Yeah. If I recall correctly, you weren't even close, dude. Not even close. Well, it was humbling. So please enlighten me. We did an episode, as we mentioned, not too long ago, called A Quick Buck, which was about how the

1:46various meanings of buck, for example, a dollar, as in making an honest buck, or a kind of marker in poker, as in passing the buck, or a male goat or deer, as in, hey, look at that buck over there. How they... That was the best I could do.

2:09Well, a C for effort. The episode was about how they all ultimately derive from that last meaning, the animal. Today, we'll discuss three more words or phrases with buck, all of which are interesting in their own way, but for different reasons. Let's start with bang for the buck, the title of this. What does that mean, Bob? How do you use it?

Bang for the buck origins

2:37Well, it implies that you are making some sort of expenditure or investment, but the value you receive makes it more than worth the price. Yeah. And we use that expression in all kinds of ways and all kinds of contexts. I was reminded in thinking about the phrase of an absolutely terrifying episode of The Daily, the New York Times podcast that I listened to earlier this year. It was about these newly developed and

3:10incredibly powerful synthetic drugs, street drugs. Here's a clip of the host, Natalie Kittrowef, talking to investigative reporter Azam Ahmed. To the extent that there's a calculation, the calculation is how bad can we make this? Meaning how potent, how strong. But obviously, potency is really valuable to not just dealers, but to producers. Completely. That's exactly right. It's the more potent, the less I have to smuggle. Correct. Right? The less risk I take. Yeah, the smaller. It's usually cheaper, too.

3:40Yeah, yeah. You know, you get, whenever, it's like the bang for the buck phenomenon. Yeah, except that the bang is too often cardiac arrest. Yeah. My point, though, is that the phrase is invoked all the time because it's a pithy, alliterative way to suggest that you're extracting maximum efficiency or value or potency from something. Mm-hmm. And because this is Lexicon Valley, the question is, where does the phrase come from?

4:12In October of 1953, the Eisenhower administration—you didn't expect me to be going there. That's not where I thought you were going to start, no. No. The Eisenhower administration released a 30-page document, famous at the time, announcing a new national security policy. This was right on the heels of the Korean War, which was very expensive for the U.S., both in money and in lives. And Eisenhower and members of his cabinet—in fact, his Secretary of

4:45State, John Foster Dulles, was on the cover of Time magazine that month—they wanted to reconfigure the defense budget to be leaner and smarter. Under this new policy, Army and Navy troops would be cut in favor of air power, especially tactical nuclear weapons. Remember, this was the dawn of the so-called atomic age, and there was a lot of optimism around the idea that nuclear weapons would render conventional warfare not exactly obsolete, but far more limited. In fact, that was a term of art,

5:21right? Limited warfare. Why would anyone want to go to war if everybody had nuclear weapons? Mm-hmm. Well, they were right and they were wrong. You know, on the one hand, mutually assured destruction, as it came to be known, has, to this date, prevented nuclear warfare. But before the advent of drones, boots on the ground has scarcely ceased, and there have been wars with soldiers and sailors and aviators just as ubiquitous and fearsome as they were when Eisenhower proposed this change

6:00in strategy. Yeah, you mentioned the term mutually assured destruction. That wasn't coined until the early 1960s. The term that was used at the time that essentially meant the same thing was massive retaliation. And it was during this year that the phrase bang for the buck began floating around in defense circles. In other words, the bang that you were getting for your buck was the hypothetical nuclear blast. You know, it's so glib, Mike. It's so glib. You can almost hear the character from Dr.

6:37Strange Love, played by George C. Scott, General Buck Turgidson, who was the head of the Strategic Air Command, talking about it in the war room. You may have some collateral damage here and there, but the bang for your buck is incredible. Yeah, I know that's one of your favorite movies, and it's up there for me too. We don't know who coined it. It didn't appear in that policy paper from October 1953. But interestingly, two very plugged-in newspaper columnists, Stuart Alsop and

7:12Russell Barnes, both used it just a couple of days apart in December of that year. And here's what I mean by plugged in. Alsop was from one of those patrician Connecticut Ivy League families with lots of connections and lots of secrets. He was related on his mother's side to Teddy Roosevelt. He served with the French Resistance in World War II. He was an actual combatant. His brother Joseph was a foreign

7:42correspondent who was a covert CIA operative and a closeted homosexual. And when extruded from that biography to become newspaper columnists, they came out as very hawkish, very far right. For sure. Although, Stuart Alsop wrote a syndicated column on December 21st about this new Eisenhower defense policy, of which he seemed skeptical. Quote, is the bigger bang for a buck theory,

8:17the theory that nuclear firepower can achieve big money and manpower savings, really sound? Hmm. He concluded, after talking to government officials and military officers, he knew a lot of them, that the more bang for the buck theory might be more of an excuse for the budget cutbacks than an actual reason. And he ended the column cleverly with another question, which came first, the buck or the bang? Hmm. Nice kicker. But you know, it's a bit cynical of him to imagine that any presidential

8:53administration would use one attractive notion as a pretext for a much more mundane problem of tidying up the budget. It's inconceivable. It's in, here's another one of my favorite movies, inconceivable, said Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride. Right. And in case people aren't aware, I think you're being sarcastic. That Alsop column is often cited as the first known example of the phrase in writing. But two days

9:26earlier, on December 19th, Russell Barnes used it, again, in a column about this Eisenhower policy. Barnes was a longtime foreign correspondent for the Detroit News. He worked for Voice of America during World War II. He also indicated some skepticism, quote, it can be contended that national safety is being sacrificed to get a bigger bang for a buck. It's worth noting that both Barnes and Alsop

9:58put the phrase in quotes, as if they were repeating something they heard from within the administration, which seems all but certain. One final thought, it has been suggested that whoever coined the phrase, probably somebody in the government, might have been influenced by an early 1950s ad campaign for Pepsi Cola. You know, this is supposedly one of my areas of expertise. I've spent far too many hours scrutinizing

10:42soft drink advertising from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. But Bounce to the Ounce is something I recall not at all. It might have been short-lived. Well, it appeared, I believe, originally in 1950, which sort of lines up as a possible influence for Bang for the Buck.

11:10Hey, this is Mike Volo with an announcement about a new show that we'll be launching in a few weeks. It's called Reading, Sense, and Sensibility, Discussing and Analyzing the Breakthrough First Novel by Jane Austen. I'll be joined by Austen aficionado David Shappard over the course of 50 episodes, one for each chapter of the book. Shappard will provide lots of historical and social context, as he's done in his annotated versions of all of Austen's novels. And yes, there happens to be

11:45a new feature film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility coming out mid-October. So whether you're an Austen neophyte or an inveterate J-Knight, it's a great time to grab a copy of the novel and dive in. There's so much to talk about beyond what's simply on the page. Stay tuned for more information from Booksmart Studios in the coming weeks. I look forward to reading along with you.

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13:46Okay, Mike, we promised our listeners that today's meaty episode would cover not one, not two, but three different buck phrases, each with its own origin story. What are the second and third?

The history of buckaroo

14:01The second buck I want to talk about is the buck in buckaroo. What is a buckaroo? Well, buckaroo is a cowboy. I think sometimes also a kind of a disparaging way to talk about someone who thinks he's a cowboy, but is really just some dude dressed up in chaps and spurs, some sort of poser. But it became a nickname. You can call somebody buckaroo the way you might call a bartender champ or sport because you don't know his name. And when we had this conversation in our meeting a week

14:37ago, I told you it's certainly derived from a cowboy on a bucking bronco probably being bucked out of the saddle. There is a word in Spanish that also means cowboy. It's spelled V-A-Q-U-E-R-O. Here's how it's pronounced in Spanish, courtesy of SpanishDictionary.com. Baquero. Ba-que-ro. Remember, the V letter in Spanish comes out sounding more like our B, B. So, baquero sounds

15:13an awful lot like... Yeah, yeah. I freaking know. And I understand what happened here. I mean, I guess just like people might say, okay, hombre. Right. Instead of hombre, there is a certain lack of language literacy that didn't recognize that certain Spanish letters may sound differently than they do in English. Exactly. So, baquero was heard by American English speakers in the mid and late 1800s as

15:47buckaroo and eventually came to be spelled B-U-C-K-A-R-O-O. Now, what's bizarrely coincidental and ironic in all of this is that baquero, the Spanish word, is also derived from an animal, but a female animal, because vaca is the Spanish word for cow. Buckaroo is technically a loan word from Spanish. It doesn't have anything to do with a buck,

16:19but rather a cow, and of course it's spelled differently than in the original Spanish because of the way it was misheard, or at least heard with an English speaker's ear. Hmm. That is a remarkable coincidence.

Tracing buck naked

16:32Which brings me to the third buck term. I assumed growing up that buck naked was a mishearing of butt naked, or a euphemism, I guess, and then became its own word. That seemed logical because buck naked didn't really make sense to me on its own. I mean, yes, bucks are generally naked in the wild, but so is every other animal, pretty much.

17:02Why not pigeon naked? Right. Why not worm naked? Yeah. Yeah. I see your logic. I mean, chimpanzees sometimes wear pants, but not in the wild. And bow ties. Right. So the problem with that theory is that buck naked dates to the early 1900s, but butt naked doesn't show up until the 1960s, so it's not possible. Buck naked came first. Mm-hmm. Which brings us back to the question, why buck naked?

17:35Which is a compelling question. There are a couple of theories. The theory I don't find particularly compelling is that the rear end, depending on your skin tone, and also given the fact that it's not generally a part of the body that's exposed to the sun, assuming you wear pants like a chimpanzee, that the rear end can resemble the color and texture of buckskin. Which it really sort of doesn't. There's another theory that I think is far more likely.

18:08We mentioned in the original Quick Buck episode that buck has a history of being used racially and racistly in the U.S. and Australia in particular to refer to indigenous men, Native Americans, Native Australians, and or African men, both during and after slavery. That use of buck has a long, unfortunate history dating back to at least the late 1700s. You see phrases like young buck,

18:42Indian buck, black buck. Especially in warmer climates, indigenous people traditionally wore much less clothing than Europeans. Also, enslaved people were frequently forced to be naked, either for inspection during auctions or for flogging or for rank humiliation. This is well documented, obviously, including in many first-person accounts in the slave narratives from the 1930s.

19:12And so the thinking is that buck naked may have evolved, especially from the practice of stripping enslaved men. And in fact, the first known use of the term buck naked is from 1913 in Atlanta. It's from a newspaper account of a man who was picked up for vagrancy while in jail. He thought that he was Adam from the Bible and took off all of his clothes. The man was described in the Georgia papers as

19:47buck naked, and yes, the man was black. Well, I can't be shocked at any kind of derogatory expression applied to black men. It is far more plausible than the whole business of having a white or pink backside that resembles buckskin, because it don't. Yeah, I mean, maybe some babies, but you know, I belong to a Jewish Y growing up, and there were no individual showers. It was one big room. I grew up

20:20seeing the backside of many septuagenarian and octogenarian Jewish men. It did not look like buckskin. More like a flan? I don't know. I don't even want to think about it, to be honest. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, who every year buys fireworks in late July to get more bang for her buck. Visit booksmartstudios.com to leave a comment or become a subscriber,

20:56which means you get ad-free versions of the show. I just made up that thing about the fireworks and live. Yeah, I think everyone knows that. All right, Mike, are we done here? We are done. Happy trails, buckaroo.