Buckeye Game

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Isaac from Richmond, Virginia.

Hi, Isaac. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Thank you. I was calling about my disability claim with the company.

Oh, sure, yeah. We can help you with that.

All right. Buckeye.

What? Wait, wait, what?

I was just going to say yes to anything he asked.

What I’m calling about is the word Buckeye,

Which is something that we used to do when we were kids in Richmond, Virginia.

You would pull somebody’s leg about something.

And then you would, at the end of it, once you got them going, you would say, Buckeye.

And you would pull your eyelid with your finger.

And I went to college in Rhode Island.

So I was up at the studio one day, and I went to art school, and I was up in the studio.

And I was pulling somebody’s leg, and I went, Buckeye, and pulled my lower eyelid.

And they looked at me like I was crazy.

And I was like, you don’t know what Buckeye is?

And they’re like, what are you talking about?

What is Buckeye?

So I started running around studio asking people if they knew what Buckeye meant, and nobody knew.

And I was dumbfounded because I thought everybody knew what Buckeye was.

And so I started asking people around campus, and then there was one woman from Virginia who worked with horses.

And she said, you know, this was a fellow student, and she said that,

I don’t know what Buckeye means in the way that you’re using it, but a horse with a Buckeye is a horse that’s blind in one eye.

I started thinking, well, maybe that’s the connection.

So I wanted to find out more about it and what you can tell me.

Well, Isaac, maybe they were all pulling your leg.

Maybe they were all standing behind you saying, Buckeye!

They cracked up when you left the room.

I do know that the horse person’s use of it is in a couple dictionaries

Referring to horses that have odd eyes one way or the other.

They stick out too much or they have some weird kind of blood thing going on.

They squint or something weird.

And, of course, buckeye for the brown nut comes from the name of, it refers to the actual eye of a buck, of a deer.

Yeah, it looks like that.

It’s got a little spot in the middle.

So it does refer to an eye to begin with.

So we have two different connections to the eye.

Now, as far as this ritual of taunting someone and then pulling down your eyelid and saying,

Buckeye, that I’ve never heard before.

Never heard of it.

You can’t give me more information about it.

Buckeye, no, we can’t.

You know what we can do, and that’s what we’re doing now,

We can put it out to hundreds of thousands of people who are listening to the program

And find out what they know about it and then get back to you.

We do have a lot of listeners in Virginia and various parts of the South

And, of course, across the country,

And somebody’s bound who have heard of this besides you.

Okay, well, great.

I’ll look forward to that.

Yeah. Now, I do know that buckeye in the 19th century referred to something that was sort of inferior.

Like you might talk about a buckeye lawyer or a buckeye doctor being not so well trained,

Or it also referred to country bumpkins.

So I’m wondering if that has something to do with it.

But the pulling down the eyelid?

Oh, so you might be calling the person a rube or a bumpkin by saying that they were fooled by your trick.

That’s what I’m thinking, but I don’t know for sure.

And I sure don’t know about that.

So you pull the lower eyelid down to expose more of the eyeball.

Exactly.

Huh.

Exactly.

For how long?

Just for a second.

Oh, just for a second.

Okay.

You just pull it down and let it go.

Well, Isaac, surely there are other people besides you who have done this.

There must be.

And they will let us know about it.

877-929-9673.

Or if you’ve heard of this Buckeye ritual, drop us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Thanks, Isaac, for calling.

We’ll see what we can do for you, all right?

Well, thank you very much.

You have a good day.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

So, of course, we have to mention the two other kinds of rituals related to this.

In California, we’ve talked about this in the program,

Moted is similar, right?

Oh, right.

You trick somebody and you say, Moted.

And then when I was growing up in Missouri in the Midwest,

Lots of people know the psych one, right?

You do something that tricks somebody and you say, Psych.

But not Buckeye.

We sure didn’t do that in Kentucky.

And there’s no eye jester either.

877-929-9673 is the number to call if you can help out Isaac

With Buckeye, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.