The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Buck Stops Here

You might assume that passing the buck has something to do with passing a dollar to the person next to you. This is not so. After all, passing a dollar would hardly shift responsibility to someone. The only thing that these two bucks have in common is a dead deer.

Not, of course, that you pass a whole animal. That would be ridiculous. The phrase to pass the buck simply involves another part of the buck’s corpse.

Deer don’t have a good time in language. Their entrails are put into pies and their skins are used in lieu of currency; one of the few parts of the buck deer that remains is the horn. Waste not, want not.

A buck’s horn makes a very pleasant-looking knife handle, and a knife has many uses. You can cut up venison with a knife, or you can skin another deer and make a fast buck. You can also use a knife to mark the dealer in a game of poker by stabbing it into the table in front of whoever currently has responsibility for handing round the cards.

This isn’t done much by people who value their furniture, but in the Wild West life and woodwork were cheap, and the first reference to passing the buck comes from the diary of a ‘border ruffian’ during the fight for Kansas in 1856. On approaching a place called Buck Creek, he says that ‘we remembered how gladly would we “pass” the Buck as at “poker”’.

This is odd because the dealer usually has a slight advantage in poker. However, among the border ruffians of the Wild West the dealer probably stood a good chance of being shot, as, if you suspect there’s cheating going on, the dealer is the first chap you should murder.

So bucks were passed without cease until the 1940s when they finally stopped in a prison in El Reno, Oklahoma. The prison governor had decided that all responsibility ended with him. He dealt, and the prisoners received. So he had a sign put up in his office saying that ‘THE BUCK STOPS HERE’.

Of course, the buck didn’t really stop there. The prison governor had to answer to the state government and then to the federal government and then to the President, with whom the buck would grind to a final and undeniable halt. This point was not lost upon an aide to Harry S. Truman who visited the prison and saw the sign. He liked it so much that he had a replica made. He gave it to President Truman, who put it up in his office and made the phrase famous.

So are all bucks really deer? Almost.