A Quick Buck

Origins of the word buck

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0:18From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and on today's episode, we'll play a few rounds of poker. Which, in my pretty vast experience, means puffing cigars and passing the buck. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. I'm great. Though, to be honest, I would be a whole lot better if you would put out that cigar. This ain't the floor at Caesars Palace, my friend. I can't breathe in here.

0:51As a matter of fact, you don't know this because we don't have the video on, but I am smoking a cigar right now. It's for health reasons. Yeah, I'm all too familiar with it. My dad was a habitual cigar smoker, so I know the smell. Full disclosure, I was well into adulthood when I found out that A, passing the buck was originally a poker term, and B, somehow the buck did not refer to money.

1:22Now, you're an inveterate card player and degenerate gambler, Bob, so I'm assuming you've known this for a very long time. I think of myself as a generative gambler.

1:36Yes, I have known this for a long time, but I didn't know it all along. I don't know what got me looking into it five or ten years ago, but I, too, was surprised when I discovered that the buck isn't a dollar bill buck. It's something else. Well, let's back up a bit, because what you might not realize, or more likely haven't thought about, is that all of the various bucks, buck meaning a dollar, as in two for a buck, buck meaning a man, as in a young buck,

2:09in which case the word is usually sexually charged and often racially charged. Ew. Yeah, and if you feel like you can imagine John Wayne using that phrase, well, he did. Here he is in the movie Hattari, referring to two men chasing the same woman. So that's why you're greener on the gills. Spring comes to the bush belt and the young bucks start butting their heads together. And here he is the following year, in the movie McClintock, talking to his daughter. You're going to have every young buck west of the Missouri around here trying to marry you.

2:42Mostly because you're a handsome filly. Also, buck meaning whatever the heck it means in poker, and we'll get to that. They all come from the same buck, the animal. What is a buck exactly? Well, I mean, I guess it's a horse or a deer or some other beast of burden or swift running animal that man, since time immemorial, has tried to tame or at least shoot to death.

3:14So buck is a really old word, time immemorial, like a thousand years old, old, for specifically a male deer or a male goat. Of course, we still use buck in that way. There's an arcade game called Big Buck Hunter that's been popular for 25 years. You hunt buck with buckshot. A buck has, by definition, buck teeth. A buckeye is a tree that has a chestnutty-like fruit, inedible, I believe.

3:49State tree of Ohio, my friend. Yeah. The fruit is thought to resemble the eye of a buck. Also, ew. So that's what a buck has been since the days of Old English.

The buck in poker

4:02Now, you being the high roller cigar chomper that you are, tell us, what is a buck in poker? Well, in a casino and in, I think, most home games, the deal moves. There isn't a steady dealer. The honor of dealing moves to its left after each hand. That has an influence on the bedding and confers on the dealer an advantage of acting last when everybody else has shown their intentions.

4:32So you put what is now widely a large plastic or ivory disc in front of you, and that is called the buck or, even more commonly nowadays, the button. Today's episode is brought to you by Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app with a mission to make secondhand your first choice. Maybe you reorganize or declutter your closet a few times a year.

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6:14I know someone who has one of those poker sets in a metal case, and it comes with one of those discs. It's the size and shape of a poker chip, only it's stamped with the word dealer on it. Back in the 1800s, when guys were playing poker in the back room of a saloon or a brothel, my uncle Danny, Daniel Epstein, he ran a rummy game in the back of his dry goods store in the 1950s when he got back from the Korean War.

6:47I know this because he got caught and arrested, and it was in the newspaper. Oh my goodness gracious. Yeah, it was a Shonda, but back in the 1800s, nobody showed up with one of those poker sets from Dick's Sporting Goods or wherever you get them. Nobody brought a dealer button to the game, but there is something that a lot of guys did bring because they brought it everywhere, and that's a pocket knife. I happen to know that when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, one of the things he had

7:21in his jacket pocket was a knife. Lots of men in the 1800s, apparently, carried one around because you never knew when you had to, I don't know, cut a rope or whittle a stick, threaten a cattle rustler. You never know when you're going to have an opportunity like that. You know, if you want to whittle and you come up short in the knife department, you're completely screwed, which is why I'm assuming Lincoln had so much trouble at National Airport

7:52whenever he wanted to take the shuttle to New York, TSA kept picking up his pocket knife. It was that and the beard, because he didn't have it, and then he grew it, and they were like, you don't look like you look in your passport photo. Yeah, or his driver's license. Yeah, and this image of Lincoln standing there going, oh, for fuck's sake, I've done it again. And the TSA guy going, come on, Mr. President, again. So in poker, you need a way to keep track of either whose turn it is to deal, as you suggested,

8:25or who won the last jackpot, which had a more specific meaning back then. You had to keep track of different things, mostly to minimize arguments and disputes, because they didn't always end well in the 1800s. As Wild Bill Hickok, with his fatal hand of aces and eights, could certainly attest, you know, if he weren't shot to death. Right, because people brought not only knives to games, but they brought guns as well. It was convenient then to use a pocket knife, and a lot of pocket knives had handles made

9:02from buckhorn. So what you call a button today, they called, starting in the mid-1800s, a buck for short. When the round ended, you would pass this buckhorn knife, you would pass the buck to the player on your left or to somebody else, depending on what you were using it for. So when you were passing the buck, you were literally moving this buckhorn knife to the

9:33guy to your left so that the next deal could take place, with the favorable position conferred on the new holder of the buck. Right, it was now his responsibility to deal.

Passing the buck

9:45That phrase, pass the buck, came to be used more figuratively, right? To pass the responsibility to someone else to do something. Ah, ah, ah. That figurative use evolved sometime in the early 1900s. There's a great example in a detective novel from 1912, where an inspector with the NYPD talks about how the police commissioner is going to get roasted by the newspapers because they have the wrong person in custody.

10:17But the police commissioner will blame the deputy commish, he says, and the deputy, quote, will pass the buck down to me and I'll have to report how it happened. That's one of the earliest figurative uses of pass the buck that we know of. And of course, everybody knows about the famous sign that President Truman had on his desk. The buck stops here. Right, now that phrase is frequently attributed to Truman, and he certainly adopted the sentiment

10:51and repeated it, but he absolutely did not coin it. In fact, there's a newspaper article from as far back as the late 1920s referring to a second lieutenant in the army who had a sign above his desk saying, the buck stops here. So that's 15 or 20 years before Truman never sat in the Oval Office. Right. But beyond that, the origin of the phrase is a mystery.

11:21Today's episode is brought to you by Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app with a mission to make secondhand your first choice. Maybe you reorganize or declutter your closet a few times a year. I do it with my dresser as well. I rotate my long pants and shorts when the weather changes. I recently made room for the soccer jersey I bought during the World Cup. And there's inevitably that moment when you wonder, what should I do with the clothes that I never wear anymore?

11:52Vinted is the secondhand marketplace app that makes it easy for people like you and me to sell our pre-owned pieces, pre-loved, if you will, to earn extra money. The app is free to download. There are no seller fees, so you keep everything you earn. And listing items on Vinted is quick and simple. Once an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. Fall is right around the corner, so it's the perfect time to sift through your summer wardrobe

12:25and ask yourself, which of these items did I not wear all season? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing immediately with no seller fees. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. I guess it's fortunate that the object used to denote dealership was a knife and not, let's just say, a plate of pork chops.

12:56Why is that? Mike, then the phrase would be, pass the pork chops. And Truman would have on, sitting on the resolute desk, the pork chops stop here, you know, which is... Ridiculous. Yeah. Let's consider ourselves fortunate.

Bucks as currency

13:13But another mystery is how exactly a dollar came to be referred to as a buck. Again, fortunate that there's no pork chops involved. That would just be a greasy mess. And yes, we are blessed. So that started in the 1850s, which is the same decade that the poker use of buck first shows up. So one unlikely theory is that every once in a while, a bunch of guys would sit down to

13:48play poker and nobody had their knife, right? Jethro was like, Jethro was like, damn it, my son Wyatt must have taken it out of my pocket. Hey, Ezekiel, what about you? Don't you always carry one in your boot? Caleb, Caleb, where's your knife? These are direct quotes. This is a real conversation. We're going to get angry letters from members of the 19th century Wild West community. As we often do.

14:19So it turns out what Ezekiel, his friends called him Zeke, what Ezekiel did have on him was a dollar coin. So they used that instead of a knife, but they still called it a buck. That may be how we came to use the word buck for dollar. The more likely theory, however, because nobody really knows, is that buck is short for buckskin because deer hides were traded as a kind of currency in the 17 and 1800s.

14:51Either way, Ezekiel was almost certainly involved, or his brother Malachi. You see some biblical names nowadays, Old Testament names, but they don't seem to be quite as in vogue as they were in the middle of the 19th century. I have a cousin named Micha. Really? Yeah. I have a cousin named Brittany. I don't know what book of the Bible that was. That's New Testament, Bob. That's not from our book. She shows up way later in like Revelations.

15:24Yeah. In fact, it's also coming to me, the famous epistle from Brittany to the Macadamians. All right. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Who prefers to make all of her purchases, not with bucks, but with smackaroos. Which reminds me, we never talked about buckaroos, which we'll get to, but in a bonus episode for premium subscribers. And you can become a premium subscriber, bucko, by visiting booksmartstudios.com and doing

16:00what you're told. All right, Mikey, we done here? We are done. Later, Gator. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports.

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