Time to knuckle down

SEELEY LAKE – When school buildings closed because of the Corvid-19 pandemic, teachers devised home assignments for their students. However, with distractions such as toys, TV and video games readily accessible in the home, many students had a hard time focusing on those assignments. And no doubt many a parent was heard to say, “Knuckle down and get to work,” or perhaps “buckle down and get to work.” While the two phrases now mean the same thing, they have different origins.

Knuckle down may sound like a gorilla’s way of walking but the phrase actually refers to the game of marbles. Though playing marbles has gone out of vogue, it used to be a favorite school recess pastime. The simplest version of the game requires smoothing out a flat space in the dirt and drawing a circle around it. The marbles that are “up for grabs” are dumped in the middle and each player has their own shooter marble.

The shooter is held in the crook of the index finger with the knuckle on the circle line. The thumb is positioned behind the shooter and flicked forward to shoot the marble toward another marble (A) with the goal of forcing marble-A out of the circle. If the player succeeds, they claim marble-A as their own. In this version of the game, raising the knuckle off the ground to get a better angle is “no fair.” It is only a fair shot if the player’s knuckle touches down on the circle line, which often requires lying stomach-down in the dirt. Thus, a player who is serious about winning the other opponents’ marbles will “knuckle down” to work.

As the game of marbles began losing favor, the rhyming term “buckle down” became the more frequently used idiomatic expression to tell someone to get serious and work harder. “Buckle down,” and its earlier phrasing “buckle to,” dates to the 16th century and referred to fastening armor on a knight before a battle or joust, obviously a prelude to serious work requiring focus and concentration. Even after the days of knights and armor, the phrase continued to be used in its metaphorical sense. The Atlantic Monthly magazine carried the first printed use of the phrase in 1865: “If he would only buckle down to serious study.”

Parents are still urging their children to do the same thing today. The more things change, the more they stay the same.