Discussion Forum (Archived)
Guest
The ritual described by the listener calling in about "Buckeye!" was quite familiar to me. As a boy, when we would play a joke on someone, specifically testing their gullibility, we would announce to them and to the world that they had been had by pulling down on one eye and shouting "Mole!" I have no idea why.
So I am no help to you about why the word "Buckeye." For that matter, I cannot tell you why our codeword was "Mole." But you are not making up the ritual.
By the way, my boyhood was misspent in Philadelphia.
The gesture is common in the German culture. It is sometimes called 'Holzauge sei wachsam'. 'Holzauge' means literally 'wood eye' which is a nonsense word in German as ist is in English. So 'Holzauge sei wachsam' = 'wood-eye beware!'. The gesture has exactly the meaning as described.
There seems to be a similar gesture in France: “mon oeilâ€:
udo, thanks for the information, and for the link, which says: This is equivalent to the English expression "My foot!" When I was a child I used both "my foot!" and "my eye!" to indicate that something was bogus or not believable, as in, "Free tickets, my eye!" I still don't understand why it means what it does, nor in quite a few years of studying French did I encounter "mon oeil". Interesting stuff. Oh, and the gesture was not part of our usage.
The French do have the same gesture, pulling down the lower eyelid with the index figure for an index. BUT it has the "opposite" meaning. It doesn't mean that the person making the gesture has tried to fool the second person, but that the person making the gesture doesn't believe something said by the second person. It's more like "yeah, right, I'll buy that" with a sarcastic tone, or "you're pulling my leg" or "stop joshing me".
The gesture is common in Japan as well. Mainly among pre-teens boys and girls but girls and women below 30 or so can do it without looking weird. It's called "akanbee" and pronounced somewhat like "a can bay". The gesture is used in several situations, including after pulling someone's leg. In that situation, it's not uncommon to call the victim fool, saying "baka" (Japanese equivalent of fool), which is pronounced somewhat like "bar car" having stress in the first syllable. As such, the same action described in the show verbatim would work to native Japanese speakers - "buckeye" and "bar car" are close enough for them. I wouldn't be surprised if it came from Japanese, but it can be just a coincidence.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
1 Guest(s)