Fussbudget vs. Fussbucket

Hello, welcome to Way With Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Patricia. I’m calling from Crescent City, California.

Hi, Patricia.

At the Redwood Coast.

Oh, nice. Pretty stuff over there, right?

It’s beautiful.

Well, I was looking at my Facebook a while back and saw that one of my friends had posted that her little boy who was teething was being a fuss bucket.

And I thought, wait, that’s not the right word.

It’s supposed to be fuss budget because my mom had always said fuss budget.

And then I thought, well, but Fussbucket makes a lot more sense.

So that’s when I decided to call you guys and find out the true story.

Interesting.

And what did you understand Fussbucket to mean?

Well, that he was being really fussy.

I guess that he had a bucket full of fuss with him.

Yeah, so you thought that that made more sense than Fussbudget, which you’d heard all your life.

Right.

Yeah, that’s so interesting because actually they both make a whole lot of sense.

Because budget is an old word that means a purse or a pouch.

Or in Appalachia, a budget is a bundle or a package.

And it comes from an old French word that means like a leather bag.

So a fuss budget is somebody that’s just a big container that’s spilling over with fuzziness.

Bag full of fuss.

Bag full of fuss.

So I can see where a fuss bucket would be a reasonable variation of that, not only because it sounds the same, but because it’s the same idea.

And there have been also, around the turn of the 20th century, there were terms like fuss pot and fuss box.

Again, something like a walking container of fussiness.

Now, fuss budget dates back to at least as early as 1870, which most dictionaries won’t tell you.

They have a much later date, so it’s at least that early.

But there’s an older expression to open one’s budget.

Did you run across this, Martha?

Sure, yeah.

And that dates to the 1500s, and it means to speak your piece or say what’s on your mind.

Right.

There are newspapers that have the commercial name budget, the Salem budget or something like that.

And it’s the idea, again, of containing something or opening your budget is unlocking your word horde, as they used to say.

It’s speaking your piece, as you say.

But the fuss budget is the actual term.

Fuss bucket is incredibly rare.

It’s rare.

And I think it’s just a misspeak or maybe mislearned.

Yeah, I would say mislearned.

But it makes sense.

Yeah.

And it sounds really similar.

Yeah.

How’s that?

Well, thank you.

That clarifies it a lot, and maybe in the distant future we’ll be hearing Fuss Bucket more because budget doesn’t make sense to us anymore.

That’s right.

We’ve lost that etymological connection, haven’t we?

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Thank you so much for your call, Patricia.

Really appreciate it.

Well, thank you guys for talking to me.

Have a great day.

Take care.

Bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

The final thing I wanted to say on this, this is one of the few words, Fuss Budget, that I remember where I learned it.

Oh, yeah?

Charles Schultz, Peanuts, right?

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

Did one a character called, I think it was Lucy being called the Fuss Budget?

Oh, that’s right.

See, I remember it because I was always called the Fuss Budget.

Oh, were you?

I mean, my mother loved calling me Little Miss Fuss Budget.

But yeah, Lucy was known as a Fuss Budget, as I was called.

Yeah, very particular and opinionated, right?

Opinionated, for sure.

And that doggone football.

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