The buck stops here?

[Jonathan Lighter]

The Nixon-Kennedy "debates" in 1960 were famously the first to prove that point.

  OED, perhaps understandably, doesn't recognize this sense of "debate," namely, "a kind of joint press conference, broadcast live, during which candidates for public office are asked to reply to questions posed by journalists and sometimes members of a studio audience."

  When I was teaching third-quarter freshman comp twenty years ago, our textbook was already mentioning the carefully cultivated rhetorical technique of appearing to respond to a question without doing so.

  Saying "The buck stop here" is a great idea, because many listeners will stop thinkingas soon as they hear it.  Mark McGwire didn't do quite so well before Congress when he refused to anser questions about his alleged steroid use by saying, "I'm not here to talk about the past."  What a constructive, proactive guy !

  BTW, I'm sticking to my story that I saw a reference to "The Buck Stops Here" on a little desk plaque in a story published during the '30s in _Our Army_ magazine.  The fact that Truman's came from the desk of a prison warden lends some credence to my tale, though a search by Fred last year found nothing.  The plaque was supposedly on the desk of a first sergeant or company commander somewhere in the continental U.S.

  JL
sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: sagehen
Subject: Re: The buck stops here?
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Charlie asks:
>Did y'all notice ......?
~~~~~~~
Sure did! It was much like Foley's own similar evasions when he said, in
effect, that he wasn't going to make any excuses for his behavior and then
went on to catalog what he clearly hoped would be taken as mitigating
factors: his alcoholism and childhood history of abuse by a cleric.
I think these public pronouncements have very different effects depending
on whether they are heard on radio or seen on tv. Remember the
Carter/Reagan debates? Listeners to radio thought Carter won hands down,
but television viewers seemed unanimous in giving it to Reagan! Pictures
clearly overwhelm words.
AM
~~~~~~~
>..... that Speaker Hastert began his much heralded statement to the press
>last week by quoting the expression "The buck stops here" (with an oblique
>but clear attribuiton to Harry Truman)--then proceded to deny any
>responsibility? He rejected the buck!

Did he not know what the proverb MEANS--or was he able to assume that Fox
News (and the other news outlets) would decline to point out the disconnect
between the proverb and the substance of his statement?

The OED, for its earliest citation of "The buck stops here," cites Truman's
own papers for 1952. The Washington Post, 15 Dec. 1946, quotes (a
youthful) Clark Clifford describing the plaque on the president's desk with
the saying incribed on it.

According to Keyes's Quote Verifier, a friend of Truman's saw the saying on
a sign on an Oklahoma prison warden's desk; the friend gave Turman a
replica of the sign in Oct. 1945.<

~@:> ~@:> ~@:> ~@:>

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