by 
MrWitch
ANSWERS: 1
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I always used to imagine someone who buckled a swash...whatever a swash was...but the meaning is quite different. The verbal forms such as "swashbuckling" are a much more recent form of the word, which was a noun "swashbuckler". In the Reader's Digest Wordfinder, the word "swash" is an archaic form of "to swagger" and a "buckler" was a "ruffian, bully". So what you have is a "swaggering bully" which then mutates into an adventurer or daredevil by the late 19th century.
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