March 18, 1997

buck

Doesn't the word "buck" in "the buck stops here" refer to "buck slips"--the forms used in the government to forward documents (and problems) to higher-ups, rather than to dollars?

Actually, it's the other way around. The expression buck slip, governmentese for 'routing form', is almost certainly derived from the expression pass the buck, but you are correct that the 'dollar' sense of buck is not involved.

The origin of these expressions comes from the language of poker. The buck was an object used to indicate the dealer of a particular hand, apparently so called because a knife with a buck-horn handle was once used for this function. (In modern casino poker, where an employee of the casino physically deals for all the players, the object indicates the position of the player who represents the dealer. This object is now usually called the button.) To pass the buck meant literally to give another person the chance to deal, and figuratively to pass responsibility on to someone else.

The expression the buck stops here was Harry Truman's way of saying "the responsibility lies with me," and alludes to pass the buck.

The literal use of buck as an indicator of the dealer in poker dates from the 1860s. The sense 'responsibility', esp. in the phrase pass the buck, dates from the 1900s, with buck-passer first found in the 1920s. But buck slip is a word of World War II, by which point pass the buck was quite common.

The origin of buck 'a dollar', which a number of people have asked about, is uncertain. A common explanation is that it derives from buckskin, after the use of deerskins as units of exchange on the frontier. Two problems with this etymology are that a deerskin was worth more than a dollar, and that buck, first attested in the 1850s, is quite rare until the twentieth century. But this is still the most likely explanation, so I'll stick with it.