skeptical about "buck" ("1856")

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks very much, Dave and Stephen.

Am embarrassed to see that I actually commented on this issue more than six
years ago!  The passage in question summarizes in Sacramento Recorder's
Court. The 1856 sentence in context reads,

"P. Holland, arrested upon charge of disturbing the peace, was fined fifty
dollars.  ----. Bernard, assault upon Wm. Croft, mulcted in the sum of
twenty bucks."

The apparent rarity of the term before ca1890 is still a little surprising,
but the earlier exx. seem to nail down the etymology.

For some reason I could not find the original cite in American Historical
Newspapers.

The J. W. Taylor quote (1854) is taken from Mann Butler's _History of the
Commonwealth of Kentucky_ (Lousiville: Wilcox, Dickerman, 1834), p. 68. It
appears in a certainly reconstructed and probably rather fanciful speech by
the Wabash chief Tabac, apparently in 1775.  Butler does not gloss the word
"buck": that tells me that he understood it not as a synonym for a dollar
but as meaning "a buck(skin) used in trade."

The earlier exx. are similar: they merely explain that a "buck(skin)" was
widely valued on the frontier at one dollar. They do not show that people
were yet using the word "buck" in speech as a precise synonym for a dollar.

I can only conjecture, as I did years ago, that some source - maybe even
the schoolroom -  had made the frontier use of buckskins in trade so widely
known that the word "buck" became affected by a certain sort of wisenheimer
to mean "dollar."

That usage may not antedate the Gold Rush, and it may have taken quite a
while to become established in the East.

JL

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 6:13 AM, Stephen Goranson <goranson at duke.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: skeptical about "buck" ("1856")
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> The ads-l archive has earlier examples:
>
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0612A&L=ADS-L&P=R10437&I=-3&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches&m=48837
>
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0612A&L=ADS-L&P=R11979&I=-3&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches&m=48837
>
> SG
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Dave
> Wilton [dave at WILTON.NET]
> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 12:16 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: [ADS-L] skeptical about "buck" ("1856")
>
> I'm looking at the facsimile provided by the American Historical Newspapers
> database.
>
> There is a slight error in the date. It is the issue of 3 July 1856, not 25
> July. But otherwise it seems to be correct. (The s in "bucks" is
> unreadable;
> that may just be an artifact of the imaging process.)
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
> Of
> Jonathan Lighter
> Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2013 10:49 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: skeptical about "buck" ("1856")
>
> Can anyone confirm the accuracy or authenticity of the well-known OED cite
> for "buck" 'dollar' from the _Democratic Journal_ of Sacramento in 1856?
>
> It appears to occurs at least thirty years before any further exx., which
> now makes me uncomfortable.
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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