buck-and-wing
buck-and-wing noun: a form of tap dance with gliding, sliding, and stomping movements performed at high speed.
Noun
buck-and-wing (countable and uncountable, plural buck-and-wings)
- A form of tap dance with gliding, sliding, and stomping movements performed at high speed.
- Something done during a presentation by the presenter to distract from any negative aspects.
- His abrupt changes of mood and tone disturb even as they dazzle the reader, insisting upon the urgency of Tate's subjects and upon the emotional precariousness of the situations in which he finds them.1984, Donald Revell, “The Desperate Buck and Wing: James Tate and the Failure of Ritual.”, in Western Humanities Review, volume 38, number 4, page 363
- With his show-business background, Reagan was unusually deft at this type of verbal buck and wing. At the president's behest, his administration renamed the multiwarhead MX missile — capable of destroying multiple major cities and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of civilians2010, Ralph Keyes, “Peacekeeper”, in Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, page 122
Forms of buck-and-wing
| plural | buck-and-wings |
|---|
Origin of buck-and-wing
From buck meaning dance and wing referring to the wing-like flapping of the arms.
Questions about buck-and-wing
- What does buck-and-wing mean?
- Buck-and-wing means a form of tap dance with gliding, sliding, and stomping movements performed at high speed.
- What part of speech is buck-and-wing?
- Buck-and-wing is a noun.
- What is the plural of buck-and-wing?
- The plural of buck-and-wing is buck-and-wings.
Words near buck-and-wing in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: buck-and-wing (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “buck-and-wing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/buck-and-wing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.