The Buck Stops Here

Come on, Uncle Ken, everybody knows what wheel bearings are. They may not know how to grease them, but they certainly know what they are. I think most people also know that a mature male deer is called a buck, not a bull. Well, elk and moose are in the deer family, and they are called bulls, but whitetail, blacktail, and mule deer males are all called bucks. Pronghorn antelope males are also called bucks, even though the pronghorn is not a deer, or even a true antelope.

Here's something that I don't think everybody knows: When Harry Truman coined the phrase, "The buck stops here." he wasn't talking about deer at all, he was talking about playing poker. It seems that there used to be a tradition among poker players to use a wooden token, which they called a "buck", so they would know whose turn it was to bet. After one guy placed his bet, he would give the buck to the next guy so he would know that it was his turn. If a guy didn't want to bet when his turn came, he would just slide the buck on to the next guy, which was called "passing the buck". I don't think they use a buck anymore, but poker players still say "pass" when they don't want to bet when their turn comes. Over time, the phrase "passing the buck" came to mean indecisiveness or reluctance to commit to any course of action. It also can mean shrugging your responsibility off on somebody else. I understand that Harry Truman was a "take charge" kind of guy who would never pass the buck, even before he became president. When he did assume the office, he placed a sign on his desk that said "The buck stops here." I am not making this up, I heard or read about it a long time ago, but I don't remember the source. Why don't you look it up for me?

Probably the most exciting thing happening around Cheboygan lately is the weather. Of course, it's not just Cheboygan, the whole eastern half of the country has been periodically getting slammed with bursts of arctic air this winter, while the western half has been basking in above average temperatures. Coincidence? I think not! I have suspected for some time that somebody has been doing this to us on purpose, and now I think I know who it is. I heard on the Weather Channel the other day that all this arctic air has been coming from Siberia. (That's in Russia, you know.) For some time now, the U.S. and some other countries have been implementing economic sanctions against Russia because of the thing in the Ukraine. I think that, to get even, the Russians are sending all their Siberian weather over the North Pole, through Canada, to the U.S. They must have developed some secret technology that enables them to do this. We need to get our own people working on that right away, if they aren't already. We can't be letting those Russians win the Weather Control Race, now can we.

Oh yeah, the Unicorn Hunters. That's the group I told you about that banishes words and phrases from the English language because of "miss use, over use, and downright uselessness".