Made In America - Bill Bryson [173]
Naturally, large sums of money changed hands at these spectacles. The Puritan ethic notwithstanding, Americans evinced an irrepressible urge to wager from the earliest days. Early gambling pursuits gave us many terms that have since passed into general usage. Tinhorn, meaning cheap or disreputable, comes from a metal cylinder of that name used to shake dice in games like chuck-a-luck (or chutter-luck) and hazard. Pass the buck came from the custom of passing a buck-horn knife as a way of keeping track of whose turn it was to deal or ante, and thus it is etymologically unrelated to buck as a slang term for dollar. American gambling led to a broadening of bet into the wider language in expressions like ‘you bet I do’, ‘you bet your life’, and so on, which foreign observers commonly noted as a distinguishing characteristic of American speech by the early nineteenth century. Mark Twain told the story of a westerner who had to break the news of Joe Toole’s death to his widow. ‘Does Joe Toole live here?’ the westerner asks, and when the wife answers in the affirmative, he says, ‘Bet you he don’t!’12
Among the favourite card games until about the time of the American Revolution were whist (a word of unknown derivation, but possibly related to whisk), brag (so called because of the bravado required of betters) and muggins (whence the term for a gullible person or victim of fate). But by the closing years of the century they were giving way to faro, a game first mentioned in Britain in 1713. Corrupted from pharaoh (a pharaoh was pictured on one of the cards of a faro deck; it later evolved into the king of hearts), faro was a dauntingly complicated game in terms of equipment, scoring, betting and vocabulary. Each card dealt had a name of obscure significance. The first was the soda card, the second the loser, and so on to the final card, the hock; hence the expression from soda to hock, and also to be in hock.13 Scoring was kept track of on an abacus-like device called a case, from which is said to come the expression an open and shut case. To break even and to play both ends against the middle also originated in faro, as did the practice of referring to counters as chips (previously they had been called checks). Thus most of the many expressions involving chips – to cash in one’s chips, to be in the chips, a blue-chip investment – owe their origins to this now forgotten game.14
Gradually faro was displaced by poker. Dispute surrounds the origins of the name. The most plausible guess is that it comes from a similar German game called Pochspiel, in which players who passed would call, ‘Poche’, pronounced ‘polka’.15 Others have suggested that it may have some hazy connection to poke or puck (an English dialectal word meaning to strike, whence the name of the hard black disc used in ice hockey) or to the Norse-Danish pokker, ‘devil’, from which comes the Puck of English folklore. At all events, poker is an Americanism first recorded in 1848. In its very early days the game was also commonly referred to as poko or poka.
Among the many terms that have passed into the main body of English from poker are deal in the sense of a transaction, jackpot, penny-ante, to stand pat, and just for openers. Jackpot is of uncertain provenance. The jack may refer to the card of that name or to the slang term for money, or possibly it may be simply another instance of the largely inexplicable popularity of jack as a component with which to build words: jackhammer, jackknife, jackboot, jackass, jack-in-the-box, jack-o’-lantern, jack-of-all-trades, jackrabbit, jackstraw, jackdaw, jackanapes, lumberjack and car jack. In none of these, so far as is known, does jack contain any particular