Etymology of Buckle Down

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Carol. I’m calling from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.

Hey, Carol. I know Cardiff very well. How are you doing?

I’m well. How are you today?

Doing well. Grant’s here, too.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, I have a question that I was wondering about.

I work at a school, and I was talking to a co-worker, and we were talking about people that are kind of whiny and, you know, can’t seem to get things together. And I said they need to buck up.

And my co-worker said I use the same term. And so we were wondering where does this come from? Is it from like bucking bronco or buckskin or something like that? Because I always took it to mean, you know, toughen up, get it together and move on, get some gumption.

Interesting.

So if I bucked up, what did I do? What am I doing?

If you buck up, it means you suck it up, get yourself pulled together, and move on.

Okay, good.

Yeah, that’s my thinking about it as well, right? It’s just like grow up a little bit, just have some stick-to-itiveness, and carry on no matter what happens.

Good advice.

It’s good life advice for anything, right?

Yeah.

Persevere, basically.

Right.

And I actually even asked my daughter what she thought it meant, and she said, yeah, it means to toughen up.

Yeah, there we go.

There are a lot of crass terms for that in military slang, but the less crass ones are like to cowboy up or to man up. We also have in English basically kind of the same thing. Although it’s gendered, so both of those are gendered.

Right.

Buck up’s better.

Yeah.

So what about that verb?

Well, it’s interesting. It comes from the verb to buckle, buckle up, buckle down, buckle to. And there are a variety of meanings for this. You know, phrasal verbs often do this.

So phrasal verb is when you have, say, the buckle part, and then you’ve got a preposition after it. So that preposition is often very variable. So we don’t care too much that it was on or to or down or up.

So speak up, speak out.

Exactly.

And sometimes the meanings are the same regardless of what the preposition is. It just depends on the period of English that you’re talking about here.

So it has meant at one point to have courage and to go forth. At other times, it’s meant to woo someone, to actually flirt with them and try to pursue them romantically. And other times it’s meant to kind of defy the odds or to defy authority, to resist whatever is trying to be put upon you.

And all these meanings of buckle up, buckle down, buckle to all have this idea of just finding your courage and doing what it takes to get the job done.

Now, imagine, if you will, a traveling trunk with a lid and a lock. These in the old times had buckles around them that you because the locks, frankly, weren’t very good. And you also wanted to stop vagabonds and people from prying into the trunk when you weren’t around.

They have buckles. You tighten those buckles. You’re keeping everything firm and in place. I don’t know that it literally came from these buckles. But buckles are the thing that hold up your pants. They hold the lid on the trunk down. They can hold your school books together while you’re climbing up the hill to the one-room schoolhouse.

So a buckle is a fastener that keeps things secure.

So anyway.

Yeah, a strengthener in other words.

A strengthener. Buckle, it was shortened to buck. And it got fixed into English as buck up. It could have easily just been to buck to or to buck at or to buck on, but instead we got buck up.

That is really interesting.

And is it a regional thing or is it all across the board?

It’s everywhere, yeah. I would argue that it’s mostly American, but I do see it pop up in British speech as well. At this point, the cross-Atlantic pollution of English is thoroughly enmeshed. It’s very hard to disentangle.

Well, yeah, you would think in the land of stiff upper lips, too.

Right, exactly.

And is it an old term?

Yeah, we’ve got variations on it back to the 1830s.

Oh, my God.

Well, that is really great. We were just so curious because we both use it. We come from different parts of the United States. We were just wondering how this came to be.

All right.

Thank you, Carol.

Bye-bye.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Carol.

Bye-bye.

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