It doesn't catch the usages in 1748 or 1856 noted by the OP, but it's a start. This isn't the question, though it does show how we can get an answer to this question and see trends. Believe me, if a buck fifty ever slid out of jeans as Which please insure me against losing track of all the latest dope on old Sigma The Emerald of Sigma Pi - Volume 8, Issue 4 - ĭear Brother Barr: Enclosed you will find a check for the necessary $1.50, for The first monetary usage from this corpus was from 1922: Here is some data-driven analysis from Google Ngrams.Īt this link you'll find a graph showing the usage, as found in Google Books, of the following: a buck twenty I'm only hitting about a buck (.100) against them, so it was especially nice to break out of it here." The Tigers have kind of cooled me all season, to tell the truth. "Actually, when Detroit was in our place (late last month) they kind of cooled me off. "The last two weeks I've only been hitting about. 362 in his last 33 games) are a little misleading," Downing said. "The stat sheets (which showed him hitting. We can drive our " first earlier known appearance" date (for non-monetary use) back to 5 September 1985 with another baseball reference, The article is in the San Bernadino Sun (p.34), the article is titled Downing drives Angels past Tigers, and the quote is, I’m not a believer.īut I'm not as impressed with his supporting arguments. I’ve heard it said the C means California, and the H means Hot. The idea was this bike could be ridden off the road, onto a dirt track, and race. The best "expansion" of the initialism that I could find was from this Quora post, where Dave Butler gives,Ĭ - Competition. "CH" refers to a motorcycle, such as this 1959 Harley Davidson Sportster CH Motorcycle. 10/14/53 Hate matrons happiness is doing a buck ten on Jimmy's CH There is the girl's name, her address, (I assume) her birth date, and then her note, Specifically, it's from one of the "self-blurbs" that kids are allowed to put in the margins. The reference is the Arlington High School Yearbook, 1971. Here's an example of someone using "a buck" to mean 100 miles per hour. This also fits with the OP's 1974 recollections involving speed and its measurement. Sorry, but I've got one from a year before your 1972 citation, and it's not monetary. I conclude from this that if the usage could be teased and played with at this point, it must have been extant for some time. For example, "We were going down the Dan Ryan at 3:00 a.m., must've been doing a buck two-eighty." I remember it because it used to annoy the hell out of me that he wouldn't give a "real" number in that context. In my first job out of college (1974) my boss used to corrupt this usage in what he thought was a humorous way. I know this must date from at least the early '70s because of the following: He cites Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, as an example: “He looks massive when he’s walking out of the water in the beach, but he’s just shredded,” he says, guessing the actor is “a buck 70,” or 170 pounds in gymspeak. This question on EL&U demonstrates that responses involving "I've never heard that usage before" may mean this could be a regional usage, but not a non-existent one. I'm just wondering when this particular usage crept into the lexicon. It's obvious where the 100 comes from: a dollar represents 100 cents. And the usage always seems to involve a number between 100 and 200: "a buck fifty" and so forth (the term seems to be wedded to the indefinite article: "a buck something"). Note, however, that we never hear multiples of this, like "four bucks" to mean 400. (Meaning: She says her salary is $180,000 a year in her new job.) She says she's making a buck eighty in her new job. (Meaning: He weighs about 140 pounds at his heaviest.) "dollar," 1856, American English, perhaps an abbreviation of buckskin as a unit of trade among Indians and Europeans in frontier days (attested from 1748).īut for most of my life I've been aware that "buck" can be used broadly in the sense of 100 of something, especially when that something involves weight and money. That said, most of us probably already know that "a buck" in AmE is a slang expression referring to a dollar. I know what the term means and I don't need it defined, nor do I require an etymology as to its origins. Before you answer, please note: I'm only interested in when this usage was established in common (American) parlance.
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