And Now For Something Completely Different...

I've always loved history and trivia, all kinds of trivia from ancient times to more modern fare and the other day... whilst I was sitting at my desk pondering a post from a fellow blogger...an image and the line "I'm your huckleberry..." (from the movie "Tombstone" with Val Kilmer) popped into my head. Had absolutely nothing to do with what I had been reading so I'm not sure why it came to mind but I thought I'd find out just why this particular movie phrase found it's way into my head...

"Huckleberry" was commonly used in the 1800's in conjunction with "persimmon" as a small unit of measure. "I'm a huckleberry over your persimmon" meant "I'm just a bit better than you." As a result, "huckleberry" came to denote idiomatically two things... First, it denoted a small unit of measure, a "tad," as it were, and a person who was a huckleberry could be a small, unimportant person--usually expressed ironically in mock self-depreciation. 

The second and more common usage came to mean, in the words of the "Dictionary of American Slang: Second Supplemented Edition" (Crowell, 1975):
"A man, (specifically) the exact kind of man needed for a particular purpose.
The "Historical Dictionary of American Slang" which is a multivolume work, has about a third of a column of citations documenting this meaning all through the latter 19th century.


So "I'm your huckleberry" means "I'm just the man you're looking for!"