Pass the Buckwheat for Breakfast Quiz

Answer: Swashbuckler

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "swashbuckler" comes from early modern English words "swash" - which means "to dash or strike something violently" - and "buckler" - which refers to "a small, round shield carried by a handle at the back"; so a swashbuckler struts around making a lot of noise, laughing and lunging in the face of danger, showing off his fighting prowess in an extravagant manner.

While my default swashbuckler is Jack Sparrow and his ilk, not all swashbucklers are buccaneers (that word has a different, French origin, applied in the Caribbean to hunters of wild oxen and boars, then extended to pirates). Robin Hood, Zorro, and other charismatic heroes are examples of swashbucklers, who may be more attractive fellows in films and fiction than we would find them to be in real life.

Answer: Buckeye

Growing up in the American south, I had never heard of the game of conkers, but my brothers and I were familiar with buckeye trees, and those large, stone-like brown seeds cried out to be thrown like baseballs. (You cried out too if conked with one.) In the British game, kids aren't supposed conk each other, but bore holes in the nuts and put laces through them, then swing and hit the opponent's conker, trying to make it break. People from the U.S. state of Ohio are called Buckeyes, and the state legislature made the nickname official in 1950.

It is also the state tree. The seed, which looks like the eye of a deer (buck), is supposed to bring good luck, so the sports teams of The Ohio State University must have an edge, with their mascot Brutus Buckeye on the field.

Answer: Trebucket

An improvement on the catapult or ballista, the trebuchet was able to propel boulders as heavy as 300 pounds over 900 feet (275 meters). Not only could such a projectile go over a castle wall, it could go through it. Sometimes, as we know from that inestimable historical source Monty Python, carcasses of animals, corpses, severed heads, or other noxious things were thrown over walls during a siege, to cause disease or terror.

While the English word "trebucket" refers to the trebuchet, it is also used to describe another device that shows up in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail": the cucking stool (or ducking stool) used to publicly shame a woman convicted of being a "common scold" (or, as in the movie, a witch).

Some cucking stools resemble smaller versions of the battle engine, and work on the principle of the lever to swing the offending woman over and into the water as a punishment when she had been warned and still she persisted in loudly expressing an opinion of her own. An earlier use of the word "trebucket" or "trebuchet" had to do with traps that could be tripped to catapult small animals or birds into a pit or confined place.

In Scotland and northern England, a trebucket was the beam used to hang up a hog from its hind legs for slaughter (speculated to be the origin of the term "kick the bucket") and in some areas also may have referred to the pulley that lifted something up to the beam.

Answer: Buckminsterfullerene

Popularly called buckyballs, molecules of buckminsterfullerene usually are made up of sixty carbon atoms that are linked together in a cage-like sphere (or more precisely an icosahedron) that researchers named for Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome, a similar structure constructed on an architectural scale.

In 1996, Robert F. Curl and Richard E. Smalley of Rice University in the US and Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex in the UK received the Nobel Prize for their discovery that chains of carbon atoms can form this cohesive structure. Since their work in the 1980s, much research is being done on fullerenes, which include carbon structures like buckyballs and nanotubes, which are cylinders rather than spheres, and the possible applications boggle the mind.

They boggled my mind so much that after reading a few articles that were over my head, I got the definition for this question from Wikipedia.

Answer: $10

A sawbuck is a United States ten dollar bill. "The U.S. An Index to the United States of America: Historical, Geographical and Political" (pages 426-27) lists over 150 slang terms for money that were around when the book was published in 1890, and by the Great Depression, when Little Orphan Annie's unofficial foster father was rich from rolling out steel for World War I, but money was in short supply for ordinary folks, more slang for money was added (like moolah). One of the slang words in the 1890 list is "syebuck" - a word used for sixpence in English slang at the time.

It's unclear what it meant in the United States, where sixpence were not used in the 19th century; however, sixpence were used, and even minted, in colonial America, and because they were thought to be lucky, "syebucks" may have been collected long after the US moved to its own currency in the 1790s.

The usual etymology given for "sawbuck" has it coming from the Dutch: "zaag" a word for a handsaw and "bok" for a vaulting horse.

A sawbuck (or sawhorse) is a frame shaped roughly like an X, used for keeping wood steady when you are cutting it with a saw; therefore, at a time when the Roman numeral X was shown on the $10 bill and a $1 bill was called a buck, someone invented the term "sawbuck" to mean a ten rather than a one, and it caught on. Maybe, it didn't hurt that "syebuck" was still a word in circulation, even though the coin was not. The etymology of the word "buck" for a dollar has its own legends and debates, but that's a story for another day.

Answer: Buckboard

A buckboard, sometimes called a Comstock wagon, was built with two flexible planks of wood that ran across the wagon frame, between the front and rear axles, with the passengers sitting directly on the planks. The boards, rather than added springs, absorbed the shock, which made riders sitting on them feel like they were on a bucking horse.

The simple frame and suspension made the sturdy vehicle adaptable to rough terrain like Father Comstock's mountains and the country farther west that was opening up in the 19th Century.

In 1864, Joubert and White Carriage and Sleigh Makers was formed in Glens Falls, New York, to manufacture buckboards, and in 1880, Edward Joubert patented a suspension system using steel leaf springs that allowed for both vertical and rocking horizontal movement, making for a more cushy ride.

These improved buckboards cost much more than regular buggies, and a list of customers' names for the improved version included the richest men of the late 19th Century. Many stagecoaches, where one might really ride shotgun, were based on the buckboard design, as were the "surrey with the fringe on top" of "Oklahoma" fame and numerous delivery and farm utility vehicles.

Some early designs of the "horseless carriage" also capitalized on the buckboard design, incorporating the word "buckboard" into the name of the automobile as a sign of quality and dependability.

Answer: Roebuck

A roebuck is a male roe deer, a species (Capreolus capreolus) native to the greater part of Europe, Asia Minor, and Asia around the Caspian Sea. Roebucks (the males) have antlers, live alone except during mating season, and make barking sounds that sound like dogs. Both bucks and does like early morning and twilight hours and are especially fond of tender grass right after a rain.

William Dampier's vessel undoubtedly was named "Roebuck" for the deer, because the list of ships built at the same time in 1689-90 include the Fox, the Dolphin, the Hawk, the Hound, the Wolf, and the Hunter, among others. They were built as fireships, intended to be filled with explosives and aimed at enemy vessels, not to sail across oceans. The Roebuck went on to be adapted as a "fifth rate" ship, a maneuverable craft used to go after enemy ships as prizes; so it is fitting that William Dampier, once a pirate, was captain when the Roebuck explored Western Australia and the East Indies. The Roebuck sank off Ascension Island on the return trip in 1701, and its wreck was not found until 2001. Roebuck Bay, at Broome, Western Australia, was named for Dampier's ship. One item found in the wreck of the Roebuck was a huge sea shell, which is appropriate, given the fame of Roebuck Bay for its pearls.

In 1886, a watch repairman named Roebuck went into business with a former railroad clerk named Sears, who had found he could make a profit selling watches, leading to the beginnings of the iconic American catalog and department store Sears, Roebuck & Co. The Roebuck name is Anglo Saxon, and is said to have come either from the characteristics of an ancestor who was small and shy, like the roe deer, or from a family that lived near a tavern with a sign that depicted a roebuck. Several such taverns are known from history: the Roebuck Inn in Warwick in England dates from 1470 and the Roebuck Tavern in Massachusetts in the United States was built in 1795.

Answer: Buckwheat

Buckwheat, eaten as a porridge called kasha (plural kashi), is comfort food in some eastern European cultures. Its origins are Asian, over 5,000 years ago, and it is the main ingredient in soba noodles, making Japan the largest consumer of buckwheat in the world. Early Jewish immigrants may have brought buckwheat to North America, where it was popular from colonial times into the 20th Century and came to be used most often as a substitute for wheat flour in pancakes. After going out of style for a time, perhaps being considered a food for peasants and slaves, buckwheat has been revived as an "ancient grain" much like quinoa, especially with the rise of gluten-free diets. Hulls are used as pillow filling, and agriculturists use buckwheat as a cover crop for soil rotation, a source of pollen for bee colonies, and food for farm animals.

While the leaves of the buckbean plant are edible, they are bitter and used as a medicine or a substitute for hops in beer or schnapps, not as a main ingredient for breakfast food. Eating buckthorn for breakfast would be unpleasant, too: it can be used with care as a powerful herbal laxative, but even eating the flesh of birds who have ingested blackthorn berries can make you sick. A buccaneer, on the other hand, is a pirate or a mighty high price for corn (my dad's joke, long ago).

Answer: Jumbuck

Waterbucks, springbucks, and gembucks are species of antelopes endemic to sub Saharan Africa. The waterbuck is in the Kobus genus, called that because to Africans in the area, this animal was a koba. Waterbucks live in scrub or savanna environments near water and will run into the water when threatened, hence the English name. The gemsbuck, an antelope in the Oryx genus, is commonly called by the Afrikaans (Dutch) name gemsbok. It lives in dry areas of southern Africa, like the Karoo and the Kalahari, and is a symbol of the nation of Namibia. Both male and female gemsboks are beautiful, with straight horns that can be blown like trumpets, so they often are hunted on safaris as trophy animals. The antelope sometimes called "springbuck" in English refers to the springbok. It is the only member of its genus Antidorcas (meaning "not a gazelle"). Its common name literally means "jumping goat" in Afrikaans, and it stands out for its characteristic "pronking" (meaning to "show off") or "stotting" (meaning to "walk with a bounce"). A springbok may jump over six feet (2 meters) into the air, over and over again.

The word "jumbuck" is used in Australia to refer to a sheep. While most other words with "buck" in them refer back to the Dutch word "bok" or its cognates in some way, "jumbuck" is not thought to have European origins. The current Wikipedia article at the time of writing this quiz sums up what other sources also say, that "jumbuck" seems to have originated as a similar sounding word in an indigenous Australian (Gamilaraay) language and means "the white mist preceding a shower" - that is, a low, white rain cloud. The word shows up in an 1841 account of the Murray Expedition, but it is best known from the famous 1895 bush ballad "Waltzing Matilda" by Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson, in which a jolly swagman grabs a jumbuck who has come to drink at a billabong and shoves it into his tucker bag, with tragic but humorous consequences.

Answer: Making a Bucket List

The term "bucket list" has become such a part of popular culture, it's hard to believe it hasn't been around for generations; however, the idiom seems to have been invented or picked up from limited circulation for the 2007 movie "The Bucket List" written by Justin Zackham and directed by Rob Reiner. Zackman's biography claims that when he arrived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, he wrote down his goals on a page he labeled "List of Things to Do before I Kick the Bucket" and later changed to "Justin's Bucket List" for short. His idea for the screenplay came from this experience, with the difference that his characters have a more limited time frame. The movie's older men, played by Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, are in the last stages of cancer and leave their shared hospital room to check off a list of risky, exciting things that they want to do and sights they want to see before they "kick the bucket" (die).

The phrase "kick the bucket" is a much older idiom, appearing in a "Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" in 1785, but there is still contention about its origins, with some people (with no historical examples to back them up) saying it comes from someone standing on a bucket while being hanged, so that when the bucket is kicked away, the person falls down and is strangled by the noose. The more scholarly explanation, no less disturbing, has the "bucket" being a wooden beam on which an animal's hind legs are tied (see the information on "trebucket" in this quiz). The other idioms in this question have their own interesting histories and controversies. You might want to find the Grateful Dead's "Going to Hell in a Bucket" and listen while you look them up. Or just put that on your bucket list. Or not.