As I came to see DEUCE and DUCE more frequently in the word games we play, I thought they were just two spellings of the same word -- maybe one was American English and the other was British -- but they are not even close. A DEUCE is a two, or specifically the face of a die that shows two spots. It does not seem to apply generally to a pair of something, as you would never say a deuce of shoes or a deuce of daisies. Another set of expressions uses "deuce" as the devil, as in "there's the deuce to pay," suggesting a lot of trouble is coming. I have also heard, "to the deuce with you." Deuce = Devil in these cases. A less common usage is for "deuce" to mean something remarkable, as in "a deuce of a situation." Merriam Webster's definition 3b is: "something notable of its kind", and their example is: "a deuce of a mess." This fits with deuce as the devil. It's not unheard of to say "a devil of
Talking about family quirks, Anne came up with another interesting phrase. She says her sister from Wisconsin says "a horse a piece" meaning "either way". So it would be the equivalent of "six of one, half dozen of the other". The first long explanation I saw for this was at Everything Summer Camp . It comes from a situation in a game where a player is trying to win a best-of-three match and each player has one win, so "one win apiece" eases into "a horse apiece". This feels most likely to me. I can see a link back to a friendly (or not so friendly) game of bar dice where, in the final best-of-three showdown, if you lose the first game, it's "a horse against you" or "a horse on you", after which, if the other player wins the second game, you would clearly have "a horse apiece." A lot of gambling games have the tokens or stakes nicknamed "horses". There's a bit of a time shift going