Gambling words from history. Ace, deuce and trey, faro and poker, blackjack and jackpot, and these just for openers.
You bet your life, you'll only pass the buck if you don't check out this etymological corner: JACKPOT HAZARD FARO CHIPS POKER BRAG KEN0 SHOOT CRAPS ONE-ARMED BANDITS BRIDGE PENNY- ANTE LEMONS - WHAT DO THEY ALL MEAN?
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 buckhorn 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!"
Among the favorite 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 bettors) 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. 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.
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." Others have suggested that it may have some hazy connection to poke or puck (an English dialectical 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 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 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 significance. People clearly just liked the sound of it.
According to Dillard, ace, deuce and trey, for one, two and three, are also American, through the influence of French gamblers of New Orleans. He may be right in the case of trey, but the first two were in common use in Britain in the Middle Ages and may date from Norman times. Ace comes ultimately from the Latin as, a basic unit of currency, and deuce from the Latin duos, or "two." The French gamblers of New Orleans did, however, give us another venerable gambling term: to shoot craps. In New Orleans the game the English called hazard became known as crabs, which mutated over time into craps. It has no etymological connection to the slang term for faeces. The French were also ultimately responsible for keno (from quine, a "set of five"), an early form of bingo that was once very popular, though it left no linguistic legacy beyond its name.
More productive in terms of its linguistic impact was a much later introduction to America, bridge, which arrived from Russia and the Middle East in the early 1890s. The word is unrelated to the type of bridge that spans a river. It comes from the Russian birich, the title of a town crier. Among the expressions that have passed from the bridge table to the world at large are bid, to follow suit, in spades, long suit and renege.
At about the time that bridge was establishing itself in America, a native-born gaming device was born: the slot machine. Slot machines of various types were produced in America as early as the 1890s, but they didn't come into their own until 1910 when an enterprising firm called the Mills Novelty Company introduced a vending machine for chewing-gum, which dispensed gum in accordance with flavors depicted on three randomly spinning wheels. The flavors were cherry, orange, and plum - symbols that are used on slot machines to this day. Each wheel also contained a bar reading "1910 Fruit Gum," three of which in a row led to a particularly lavish payout, just as it does today. Also just as today a lemon in a row meant no payout at all - and from this comes lemon in the sense of something that is disappointing or inadequate. The potential of slot machines for higher stakes than pieces of chewing-gum wasn't lost on the manufacturers and soon, converted to monetary payouts, they were appearing everywhere that gambling was legal, though no one thought to call them one-armed bandits until the 1950s.
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