44-The Buck Stops...? (Acts 25:1-27)

The Buck Stops Here

President Harry Truman made this saying famous in 1945 when he commissioned a plaque for his White House desk that said in bold letters, “The Buck Stops Here!”

The origin of the phrase comes from a slang term from the game of Poker during the frontier days.  The dealer would switch every hand and would be designated by a knife with a buckhorn handle.  If a person preferred to not deal, he would “Pass the Buck”, which came to mean “passing the responsibility on to someone else”.

In his farewell address to the American people given in January 1953, President Truman referred to this concept very specifically when he said, "The President--whoever he is -- has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job!”

 

2/17/2008