Post edited 10:42PM – Jul-16-11 by katydid

About "buckeye" — bear with me, because this is a long speculation –
I've never heard this slang or seen this little ritual trick, but I mostly grew up in Virginia & Martha's mention about an old use for the term that meant second-rate triggered an idea. These are the elements of it:
Word Detective says, "Apparently the buckeye tree was considered useless and annoying by early settlers, and as of the mid-19th century the adjective "buckeye" (as in "buckeye lawyer") was synonymous with "second-rate" or "incompetent."
Cassell's (2005) Dictionary of Slang adds the notion of a rustic country person as well as the definition of Buck-eyed: adj. [mid-19thc+] (US Black) having eyes considered out of the ordinary, cross-eyed, squinting, protruding, etc. [SE buck, to project].
I don't know if this is coincidence or confluence, but given the fact that these two slang terms come from the same era, I can't help but think that they might be related or perhaps co-evolved with each other. Not quite sure what "SE buck, to project" refers to, except that SE means "standard English." At any rate, we're getting closer to a connection between someone with funny eyes and an incompetent rustic country person who could be easily fooled.

It may be too much of a leap to make, but all of this made me think of my studies on 'poor white trash' in graduate school, reading the passionate frustration with which 19th c. scholars described poor whites in the South (who were mostly the descendants of poor Scots-Irish & English prisoners whose greatest crime was usually poverty) as lazy, bony, sallow, lank-haired, with misshapen heads, dull sunken eyes, "awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief" (D.R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 264.). Growing up in the South, we all know about this stuff but are too polite to talk about it much these days. It's the Deliverance stuff. But, as it turns out, there was some science to the story.

At the turn of the last century, hookworm disease was discovered in epidemic proportions in this population and a campaign set out to erradicate it. Most people in that social class didn't wear shoes, walked in feces-contaminated soil (didn't have outhouses, etc.), and caught the worm through breaks in the skin — hookworm only grows in tropical and subtropical soil, thus its presence in the South. Then they craved dirt because of the hookworms (and earned another nickname: clay-eaters) & re-infected themselves — a vicious cycle. Despite the fact that severe hookworm infection causes mental retardation when acquired in infancy, as well as severe anemia (sallow, lazy, bony) & many of the other physical symptoms observed by Hundly & others, the campaign to transform poor whites into model citizens by treating hookworm disease didn't work…because its true cause was poverty. Turns out the healthy immune system (made so by good diet & the other hallmarks of a good standard of living) can either keep hookworm at bay or eliminate it. In the end, it took longer to bring about the social change that was needed to end that depth of poverty.

Anyway, this is all gross and to say that maybe "buckeye" is a reference to this throw-away class of people that were seen as stupid and ignorant and funny-eyed due to malnutrition and the maladies of poverty.

I don't think it's the "my eye" interpretation, because, as someone else pointed out, that has the opposite meaning: "I see you, I see through your game."

And buckeye could be some other reference altogether! This was just what jumped to my mind.
Thanks. I LOVE this show!

**ps: The symptoms of drooping, sunken or yellow eyes may have been the hallmark chosen and codified by this slang ritual — that, actually, now that I think of it, is starting to ring a bell. Not in relation to pulling someone's leg and not with the word "buckeye," but pulling the lower lid down to indicate idiocy, backwardness, etc. I'd have to have to ask old-timers to be sure.

Re: Orange. Martha, you'll find this especially interesting, if you haven't heard it yet. In Puerto Rico, the fruit has an unexpected name: china. As a student of Spanish, but not a native speaker, during an extended stay in the west of the island, I heard friends refer to the citrus fruit as una china. When I asked, they gave me an etymology of sorts, which sounds completely plausible, that the word came from the printing on the crates that originally brought the fruit to the island. I'm not sure if that usage is unique to PR, but I tend to think it is. In Cuba, for example, I didn't hear china at all, only naranja.