What about buck and buckeye ? (Marietta: university, horse, trees)

[O I A]

I saw here in columbus everywhere : ( buck ) and ( buckeye ) !
I saw it more in OSU and at a lot of of product , then I searched about it in dictionary but i didn't find any thing !
can you explain it to me ?

[jbcmh81]

A Buckeye, the mascot of OSU, is a nut from the Buckeye tree, native to Ohio. It's called a buckeye because the nut resembles the look of a deer's eye.

[98PanAm]

A male deer is called a "buck", and the fruit of the horse chestnut trees native to this region (Aesculus glabra) looked like the eye of a buck to the native Americans and early settlers of this area, so the Ohio horse chestnut trees became known as "buck eyes". Gradually, people from Ohio also became known as "buckeyes" (almost every state has a nickname for their state and native citizens). One story of how this came about, probably apocryphal, is that one of the early white settlers near Marietta (the first permanent American settlement in what is now Ohio) was a rather large individual. The local indians jokingly nicknamed him "Hetuck", which was their word for "buckeye", because he was round like the nut of a buckeye tree, or, depending on which version of the story you prefer, as a name of honor. As that particular story goes, the name gradually evolved to mean any resident of the Ohio country. In reality, it's just one of many explanations of how it happened, and no one seems to know for sure.

As for how the name got attached to the sports teams of THE Ohio State University, in the early days of college football and other college sports, the teams had no official names or mascots. Names and mascots of college sports teams across the US evolved over decades, which is why many college teams have such colorful names and mascots which on the surface sometimes seem to make no sense, or not even match each other (the University of Alabama "Crimson Tide" and an elephant mascot, for example).

The OSU football team in particular was called a variety of things in the newspapers back then, such as "the Varsity Eleven", or, from the more creative reporters, names like "The Scarlet Scourge". Most often over a period of years they came to be referred to as "the Buckeyes", as was any native of Ohio. That did not become their official team name until 1950, however, sixty years after the football team's first season. In common usage (but not officially), the name sometimes gets shortened to "the Bucks".

[O I A]

jbcmh81
98PanAm

thank you so much for the explaining
now I understand

[iwantyall2know]

You will also hear alot of OH-IO!! We love our OSU sports ESPECIALLY our college football and we are proud of our University and take pride in our City...We are die-hards, some from other areas would say we are "cult like". The name originated from the tree that is indigenous to the state.