Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the bucks stops with her when it comes to who is blame for a deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

My comments:

“The buck stops here” is best to be learned together with another commonplace American idiom passing the buck.

The “buck” in both phrases is short for a buckhorn knife, made from the horn of a deer. The buckhorn knife was often the object poker players in the olden days used during the game, passing it on from one another – signaling that it’s their turn to deal the next game if the buck is in front of them.

Hence, from this, passing the buck becomes a general phrase for passing one’s responsibility to others.

In our example, Hillary Clinton, by “the buck stops with her”, means to say that she is the one who is responsible here and that she’s not a person who tries to shift blame to others when things go wrong.

Politicians in America like to use this phrase, presumably following the example Harry Truman, a war-time president who is said to have had on his desk a sign with these very words written on it:

The Buck Stops Here.

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本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.