buck v.3
1. (also bukk) to talk, to chatter.
![[Ind]](/static/img/flags/ind.png "India") | ‘His Brother’s Keeper’ in Civil & Military Gaz. 7 Apr. (1909) 112: ‘How the deuce d'you expect a man to improve his mind when you two are bukking about drinks?’. | |
| ‘“Sleipner, ”late “Thurinda”’ in Civil & Military Gaz. 12 May (1909) 135: ‘When a man bukhs too much about his wife or his horse, it’s a sure sign he‘s trying to make himself like ’em’. | |
| Civil & Milit. Gaz. (Lahore) 10 Mar. 4/2: ‘You've heard old ‘Koi hais’ buck about ‘the bearer of the past’? | |
| Mr Jervis 244: ‘They come here fairly decent servants – but the desperately dull life, no bazaar, no other “nauker log” to bukh with, is a want no wages can repay.’. | |
![[UK]](/static/img/flags/uk.png "United Kingdom") | ‘Slaves of the Lamp — Part II’ Complete Stalky & Co. (1987) 282: Well, I can’t tell a yarn. I can chip in when the other fellow starts bukhing. | |
| Kim (1987) 150: What was you bukkin’ to that nigger about? | |
| Dew & Mildew 231: ‘And what about your orderly at the private meeting?’ [...] ‘Well, I’m coming to that if you didn’t buck so much’. | |
![[Scot]](/static/img/flags/sco.png "Scotland") | Lost World 15: ‘You never said so.’ ‘There was nothing worth bucking about’. |
2. to swagger, to talk big or bumptiously, to brag.
| Hobson-Jobson 89/1: Buck, s. To prate, to chatter, to talk much and egotistically. Hind. bakn? | |
| Civil & Milit. Gaz. (Lahore) 27 Sept. 1/4: So take your rifles in your hands, and see your belts are clean; / You can ‘buck’ about it after in the Regiment’s canteen. | |
| A Thief in the Night (1992) 392: He was certainly bucking about his trophies. | |
| Greenmantle (1930) 145: I knew he had knocked about the East, but I didn’t know he was that kind of swell. Sandy’s not the chap to buck about himself. | |
| Old Contemptibles 92: ‘Why don’t the soors come an’ fight it out?’ said Corporal Smedley. ‘They bukked enough about wot they was goin’ to do. Why don’t they hitherao an’ do it? I’m about sick o’ this shellin’ game’. | |
| Vignettes From Indian Wars 185: [W]hile the Afridis often ‘bukhed’ of their glories, no Europeans had seen them. | |
| Three Englishmen 180: Macalister knew a lot about poisons. He’d made a study of them, was always bukking about antidotes for snakebite at the club. |
In compounds
(Anglo-Ind.) a chatterer [EDD buck-stick, a smart or sprightly fellow; an old friend; prob. from an actual stick used for games of spell and knur].
| Out of Meshes III 65: What hope can you have for the immortal welfare of people who call courtesy to ladies ‘doing Sammy!’ and a man of pleasing conversational powers like my Major Pulfington Belper ‘a buck-stick?’. | |
| in Yule & Burnell Hobson-Jobson 117/1: A buck-stick is a chatterer. | |
| Sporting Trips of a Subaltern 137: The Somali, excellent fellow though we found him in many ways, is, to use a schoolboy term, a fearful ‘buck-stick’. | |
| Two Dianas in Somaliland 95: They are frightful ‘buck-sticks,’ but I never saw any cowardice to disprove their boasting stories. | |
![[US]](/static/img/flags/us.png "United States") | Further Side of Silence 322: Buck-sticks the men of M?nangkâbau; cheats the men of Rambau; liars the men of Trengganu; cowards the men of Singapore; sneak-thieves the men of Kelantan; and arrogant are the men of Pahang. | |
| Youth & East 59: He was fifteen years older than I, a bit of a self-conscious play-actor, of the order of ‘bucksticks’; the role of instructor to the impressionable greenhorn was congenial. |