The difference between a huckleberry and a buckeye

Dear Matthew Alice: In the movie Tombstone, Doc Holiday says, “I’m your huckleberry.” In the song “Moon River,” Perry Como sings, “I'm your huckleberry friend.” And of course there’s Huckleberry Hound and Huckleberry Finn. What does “huckleberry” mean? — Shauna Aiken, San Diego

Matt: What is a buckeye? — Internet Guy

Perry Como? Andy Williams. Well, maybe Perry crooned about that ole mooooon river too. A huckleberry is fruit. Like a big blueberry. Strictly an American word (and bush), going way back into the 1600s, probably a corruption of the name of an English fruit, hurtleberry. Huckleberries grew wild everywhere in cold-weather climates and by the 1700s became associated with anything rural, tranquil, untouched. From there it was hardly a stretch to transform the meaning, in the 1800s, to “simple,” “small,” “insignificant.” The OED cites Whittier’s 1866 “Snow-Bound” as example (“Dread Olympus at his will / Became a huckleberry hill”). Twain used the word “huckleberry” in that sense in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, referring to some sharpie as “no huckleberry.” His Huck Finn, of course, represented the simple joys of bucolic childhood.

Buckeyes are the seeds of the horse chestnut tree, another plant found all over the cold-weather U.S. (Can only guess Ohio is lousy with them.) Take the green flesh off the horse chestnut fruit and inside is a roundish, very smooth and shiny, deep-brown seed. All those corn-fed, early-American huckleberries thought they resembled deer’s eyes.

And if you cross a huckleberry with a buckeye, you get “The Hucklebuck.” That’s a dance and Paul Williams’s great jump-blues tune from the late ’40s (“Push your partner out / Then you hunch your back / Start a little movement in your sacroiliac....”). “Huckle-backed” is an old term for “hunchbacked.” No fruits, no nuts, just good old R&B.